It is in Egypt that an effective demonstration has been made of what can be accomplished by an intelligent landlord on a great estate. Here was a country the people of which were living on its ancient monuments and the erratic rise and fall of a great and uncontrolled river. These people have only just learned to laugh, and how could they have done so before, living as they were in the shadows of countless centuries of slave-driving by rulers who took everything from them and did nothing in return?
“What do you think of the British rule?” I asked an Egyptian farmer.
“We pay our taxes only once now,” was the reply he made.
But in that he summed up the evils of past administrations and one of the greatest benefits of the present. The Turkish flag flies over Egypt, but the Khedive is an intelligent man, so he does not take his position very seriously. “England can have Egypt any time she wants it,” say the European diplomats at home. Those on the ground say: “England has Egypt now. Why should she take it twice?” That is the truth. England has Egypt. The Egyptian nationalists would like to have it for themselves, but they will not get it as things are going now. The noisy and talkative politicians who crowd the cafés of Cairo can plot and scheme to their hearts’ content, but there is a force at work apparently beyond their power of comprehension. Mistakes are sometimes made through the stupidity of subordinates, but a quiet and commanding impulse is behind the finances of the country, is applied to the industrial regeneration of the people, and the army is its complaisant ally. Millions of money have been spent to regulate the Nile, and millions more are constantly being added to this fund to bring the land up to the highest point of its marvelous productive power. Here it must be watered and there drained. Thousands of tourists annually visit the monuments and bewail the gradual disappearance of the temples of Philæ as the crest of the Assuan dam rises higher and higher; but for every foot it submerges the temples, it adds thousands of acres to the green fields of Egypt, from which the granaries are filled to running over. It is a symbol of the decline of the old and the coming of the new régime.
Those who come from the centers of civilization elsewhere find it hard to reconcile themselves to this new order of things, for the treasures bequeathed by ancient to modern Egypt are like unto no others in the world, a wonderful and enviable heritage; but they were built at the expense of the people of long ago, and now, when Rameses II lies in the Cairo museum, the descendants of the starved and whip-driven slaves who built his monuments are coming into their own under the paternal eye and assisted by the guiding hand of a new civilization. It was not without a sign, however, that this Egyptian king yielded to the spirit of the present, for, as the story goes, when his mummy was taken from its tomb, the wrappings undone, and the remains placed in temporary position in the museum, one of the horrified attendants saw him slowly raise his arm, as if in protest, from the position it had occupied for centuries. The curator attempted to quiet the fears of the attendant by a scientific explanation as to change of temperature and humidity causing a relaxation of the time-bound muscles, but to this day the more superstitious move with cautious tread in the neighborhood of the glass case in which rest the bones of this builder of wonderful monuments to himself, his wives, and his patron gods. In all of Egypt there is nothing left to tell of anything done for the people. From one end of the land to the other monuments good, bad, or indifferent were built to the glorification of the living when they should come to die. “Tombs of sorts,” as a weary tourist expressed it, but tombs they are, and as the history of Egypt unfolded itself they proved to be in reality more the graves of the hopes and aspirations of a nation and of the hundreds of thousands who died in the building than of the rulers they were meant to glorify. It was not until the Romans came fresh from the oratory of the Forum that a temple was built to the gods of all the people; but even these are few and far between.
Far out in the desert on a still and glorious night I talked with my Arab guide as to the stars and his knowledge of the trail through their guidance. He was struck dumb when I told him I had traveled countless miles in other lands by the same guiding lamps that then looked down upon us.
“I knew you had a moon,” he said, “but I did not know it was the same moon,” and as I looked far out into the silvery desert with its fleeting cloud shadows, and the remoteness of all things elsewhere was borne in upon me, I almost believed with him that it was a moon that shone for Egypt alone, and that he was wise and I was ignorant; for this land, its history, its people, and their problems are like unto no others.
To stand on the edge of the ocean of sand that reaches to the westward hundreds upon hundreds of miles and view the brilliant green meadows of the Nile Valley at one’s feet, watered as it is by the floods generated in the tropic torrents which fall somewhere in the heart of darkest Africa almost beyond the ken of man, is to realize what water means to the twelve million people of Egypt in their struggle for existence. Without it, land is to be had for the asking; with it, the most fertile farm in the corn belt of the Mississippi Valley is to be bought acre by acre, for half the price.
The foreign commerce of Egypt has grown apace as the country has come under the sane and regulating influence of the Anglo-Saxon. The landlord has reaped, and will long continue to reap as his reward, a golden harvest of profitable trade and investment; but he takes none but a natural advantage to himself. The German, the American, the French, and all the other traders of the world are free to come and go and to compete in supplying the wants of Egypt. The growth of the Egyptian trade of other nations has been coincident with that of the British, and the United States trade is no exception to this rule.
In 1911 the United States imported from Egypt $21,700,000 worth of merchandise, or about one sixth of what Egypt has to sell. In the same year the United States sold to Egypt $2,114,000 worth of goods, or about one and a half per cent. of what was purchased. These figures of import and export show a gain in gross amount of nearly one hundred per cent. over the commerce of two years preceding. The producing and absorptive power of the Egyptian people is steadily increasing. They have yet far to go before they reach modern standards, but since their release from the weight of ungoverned Turkish misrule they have shown a recuperative power almost equal to that of the wonderful soil upon which they live. Their trade will increase from year to year, and as it grows larger, the share of the overlord the sultan and his sub-tenant the Englishman will decrease in proportion, and thus it is that in these days of internationalism the welfare of one community is the concern of all even in a most narrow and practical sense—that of markets for the handiwork of man.