Page:The Egyptian Difficulty and the First Step out of it.djvu/12

8 bolised. To reorganise the administration, to revive the power which had crumbled to dust in Tewfik's own hands, was, with Tewfik again on the throne, a task upon the difficulty of which the victors at Tel-el-Kebir had not calculated.

What appeared to be the leprous limb of the Egyptian body-politic had been amputated, and the English fondly imagined that a tonic regime would now restore the whole system to soundness. It was soon, however, their lot to discover that the disease was in the body rather than in the severed member. They had got rid of the one only element that showed vigour and unity of purpose, and when they found themselves left with Tewfik upon their hands, in a chaos of disorder and dissension, they came to doubt whether they had taken the better part, and were driven to seek for consolation in the purity of the abstract principle upon which the course of their action was shaped.

It might reasonably have been expected that so soon as this principle had been vindicated, the very first thing done would have been carefully to scrutinize the efficiency of the instrument through which the English were about to begin their work of reorganisation. But no such idea apparently ever crossed the British mind. Having restored the Khedive, whoever he might happened to have been, to his throne, it certainly became the right as well as the duty of England, to consider whether Tewfik who happened to be that Khedive, was the fit man for the Khediviate. And the duty of so doing was all the more obvious