Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/315

 BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. DCCCXXXIII.

MARCH 1885.

VOL. CXXXVII.

OUR EGYPTIAN ATROCITIES.

FROM CAPEL COURT TO KHARTOUM.

" centuries look down on you." So spoke the First Napoleon to his army of the Nile. "Forty centuries look down on you," may in a more solemn, if less dramatic sense, be said to-day to the British Government in Egypt. From the time of the Pharaohs, the valley of the Nile has been the theatre of great historical events. Wave after wave of conquest has rolled over it, and left it much the same. Dynasty after dynasty has oppressed it, and the fellaheen have bowed their necks meekly to all. Ever a fascinating bait for the military adventurer, it has felt the heel of Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman. But in the long series of its conquests, there is nothing to parallel the unhappy condition which it presents at this moment. It has seldom, if ever, been so demoralised socially, and it was never so completely left without the poorest pretence of a Government. Had it been overrun by thirteenth-century Norsemen, it would have received some return for the sufferings inflicted on it, but the foreign occupation it now endures has hardly one alleviating feature. It has cut off the past, without opening up the slightest glimpse of a future. It has exacted from a long-suffering people great sacrifices, and, so far, it offers them not a ray of hope of compensation. The situation has grown up like a nightmare, without any visible origin or intelligible cause. Why there should be a British garrison at Cairo; why British troops should be fighting for their lives in the Soudan; why the fellaheen should curse in their hearts these brave fellows who are dying for them – Heaven only knows. The British Ministers who preside over the holocaust, and who in the eyes of the world are responsible for it, have even yet no definite idea on the subject. They have floundered out of one desperate expedient into another, until Egypt seems to have no room left for a fresh catastrophe. Insolvency, revolution,