The Consul-General flung down the paper in disgust.
"Fossils of Whitehall! Dunces of Downing Street!"
For some minutes he tramped about the room, telling himself again that he didn't care a straw what any Government and any Foreign Minister might say because he had a power stronger than either at his back—the public.
This composed his irritated nerves, and presently he took up the other newspapers. Then came a shock. Without an exception the journals accepted the Minister's speech as a remonstrance addressed to him, and reading it so they sympathised with it.
One of them saw that Lord Nuneham, however pure and beneficent his intentions might be, had no right to force his ideals upon an alien race. Another hinted that he was destroying England's prestige in her Mohammedan dominions, and, if permitted to go on, he would not only endanger the peace of Egypt, but also the safety of our Indian Empire. And a third, advocating the establishment of representative institutions, said that the recent arbitrary action of the Consul-General showed in glaringly dangerous colours the faults of the One-Man Rule which we granted to the King's representative while we denied it to the King himself.
The great Proconsul was, for some moments, utterly shaken—the sheet-anchor of his public life was gone. But within half-an-hour he had called for his First Secretary and was dictating a letter to the Premier, who was also the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
"Having read the report of your lordship's speech at the Mansion House," he said, "I find myself compelled to tell you that so great a difference between your lordship's views and mine makes it difficult for me to remain in Egypt.
"I take the view that nine-tenths of these people are still in swaddling-clothes, and that any attempt to associate them with the work of government would do a grave injustice to the inarticulate masses for whom we rule the country.
"I also take the view that Egypt is honeycombed with agitators, who, masquerading as religious reformers, are sowing sedition against British rule, and that the only way to deal with such extremists is by stern repression.
"Taking these views and finding them at variance with those of your lordship, I respectfully beg to tender my resignation of the post of H.M.'s Agent, Consul-General and Minister Plenipotentiary, which I have held through so many long and laborious years, and at the same time to express the hope that my successor may be a man qualified by knowledge and experience of the East to deal with these millions of Orientals who, accustomed for seventy centuries to the dictation of imperial autocrats, are so easily inflamed by fanatics and yield so readily to the wily arts of spies and secret conspirators."