Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/47

 the imminent Berlin Congress, it accepted Baring.

The British commissioner joined the Caisse in March 1877, but kept in the background awhile to study the sources of revenue, ignorance of which had brought Goschen's ‘settlement’ to nothing. Little seen in Cairo society, he soon knew more than his colleagues, and his masterful will began to impose itself. He it was who, early in 1878, inspired the damning exposure of provincial maladministration which led to the four members of the Caisse being constituted by the powers a special commission of inquiry under Sir [q.v.] and Riaz Pasha. Their inquisition proved at once too much for the prime minister, and by the spring of 1879 for Ismail. The first report was followed by a show of compliance, to be nullified presently by a military mutiny fomented ad hoc. It was succeeded by a second report, drafted by Baring in March 1879, which declared Egypt bankrupt, and proposed liquidation. Ismail repudiated the imputation, beat the patriotic drum, and closured the inquiry. Baring waited a month to see if any power would intervene, and finding none, resigned his membership of the Caisse and went home. Hardly was he in London before Bismarck roused the powers to action. Ismail was unseated in June and Tewfik was preferred in his room. France and Great Britain revised and revived their dual control, and Baring was summoned, from thoughts of standing in the liberal interest for East Norfolk, to see Lord Salisbury, and to consider the post of British controller. He hesitated, but, being advised by Mr. Gladstone to eschew home politics, accepted, and went out to join M. de Blignières in September.

Ignoring the formalists at the Quai d'Orsay, Major Baring agreed quickly with his colleague to pool functions rather than delimit them, and proceeded to set the direction and pace of the control. The country, he held, must be ‘morally healed’ by administrative reform before being politically regenerated. By March 1880 he had put the work in hand, but not without offering to France the unpleasant spectacle of a British controller openly preferring fellahin to bondholders and dominating the dual control. Under the circumstances it is hardly surprising that, after little more than six months' tenure, he should have been offered another post, which, perhaps, his government, committed to France in the matter of the dual control, did not intend him to decline. He was asked by Lord Ripon to be financial member of the viceroy's council in India, and on acceptance he went home in April. Repassing Cairo in early December he warned Riaz to keep his eye on the army, but was assured all was well. He reached Bombay before Christmas.

Baring's earlier sojourn in India had left a memory, and his Egyptian fame had preceded him. A suggestion of autocracy in his brusque speech and manner excited the ready jealousy of the Civil Service. ‘They seem to regard me’, he wrote, ‘as an Incarnation of the Devil and the India Office.’ But his conservative attitude in financial matters quickly conciliated the opposition. There was nothing sensational in any of his three budget statements, but much to show his appreciation of the Indian peasant's singular dependence on the state, and of the balance of profit and loss under progress of the European type—the sort of calculation which would always interest Baring. It was a period of monetary stringency, of heavy calls for the recent Afghan War, of depreciated currency and an unsatisfactory fiscal system. But the financial member, deprecating revolutionary changes, had not only established his authority, but had won sympathy from natives as well as British when, in August 1883, he received a fresh call. The pot that he had left simmering in 1880 had boiled up and over.

After a series of events which need not be recounted here, Great Britain found herself saddled with sole responsibility for constructing in Egypt an administration to replace one that she had destroyed. A few months' experience of chaos under the khedivial restoration, and reports from Lord Dufferin, who had been commissioned to outline a policy, convinced Whitehall that it must find some one to patch up the civil administration before troops could be withdrawn. Since there was no longer any question of dual control, Baring, who had been in correspondence with Sir Garnet Wolseley, the commander of the British troops in Egypt, might be entrusted with the mission. He landed at Alexandria on 11 September 1883.

Thus Sir Evelyn—for he had been gazetted K.C.S.I.—came to the chief task of his life at forty-two. Not a man of genius, he possessed unusually powerful and versatile talents, whose full exercise was ensured both by a strong character matured in a varied school of experience, and also by the vigorous physical constitution of a tall upstanding man. Level judgement was the qualification he most valued, and  21