Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/47

Rh of simple justice, Egypt for the Egyptians? But the course of events has so drifted within a few months, and so many new elements have come in to change the issue, that "Egypt for the Egyptians" would now mean Egypt to be given up to anarchy and ruin. It is not easy to apportion praise or blame between nations any more than between individuals. There may be wrong on both sides. I am far from thinking England blameless in her dealings with Egypt. In the matter of the Anglo-French Control, there is much which an Englishman would wish to forget. But that does not change the fact that when it came to the point of war, the issue was sharply defined between anarchy and order, between civilization and barbarism; and no friend of humanity could hesitate where to bestow his sympathies. It was precisely the same question in Egypt which so often recurs to the traveller in India. If we go back to the origin of English power in India, the world can hardly furnish a case of greater spoliation and robbery. All the denunciations of it by Burke were fully deserved. And yet in the course of a hundred years, things have so come round that to-day the maintenance of English power is the security of order and peace in India, and the hope of civilization in Southern Asia. And when I visited the Residency in Lucknow, and walked over the holy ground where so many of the best and bravest of England fought and fell, it was with no divided sympathies between its defenders and the murderous Sepoys that gathered round them for their destruction. No matter what were the wrongs suffered by another generation of Hindoos from another generation of Englishmen — that could not change the issue, that the battle then being fought around those walls was a battle between European civilization and Asiatic barbarism. And the same thrill of joy and pride that shot through every