Page:The Egyptian Difficulty and the First Step out of it.djvu/29

 actual exercise of sovereign power, the sense of it was always kept alive, and the Sultan felt himself to be sovereign of his dependency. All this has been cut off; and even if Tewfik had the tact and ingenuity to attempt to revive it, which he has not, the ill-will borne to him is now too deep for him to have any chance of success.

It is a yet more serious difficulty that Tewlik should so entirely have lost touch of Moslem sympathies. The policy of Abdul Hamid is to cultivate these sympathies to the utmost; he pursues it with marked ostentation, and his whole heart is set upon it. By no possibility, then, could the Sultan feel complacency in the rule of Tewfik in Egypt; and the Moslem Sheikhs of Egypt and the Hedjaz, to whom Tewfik is anathema maranatha, will always have his Majesty's ear and his entire sympathy.

There is one token of deferential respect which no vassal prince, or governor-general, ever omits, and that is to send to the Sultan on four occasions in every year—viz., the Bairam, the Kourban-Bairam, the day of the Sovereign's accession, and his birthday, a telegram of congratulation. This is the irreducible minimum of deferential show expected by the Sovereign from the vassal. Albeit, the two latter have not in all cases the same importance as the two former. But for a Moslem vassal to neglect, on either of the two great festivals of Islam, to send his message of homage to the Khalif, is an unpardonable slight. No message came from Tewfik to the Sultan either on the Bairam or Kourban-Bairam of