OUR DUTY TO INDIA

It is a mistake, however, in politics to look too far ahead.  Sufficient unto the day.  For the time being we may be certain of one thing, and that is that we cannot break the Indian connection and leave India.  Both our interests and our obligations demand that we should remain at the helm of Indian affairs for many years to come.  That being so, let us accept our part cheerfully and with goodwill as in the past.  Let us try to give India of our best, as we have done heretofore.  Let us regive and regain, above all things, goodwill.  Let us not resent the loss of past privilege, the changes in our individual status, and let us face the position in a practical and good-humoured spirit.  Let us abandon all talk of holding India by the sword, as we won it by the sword—­because both propositions are fundamentally false.  Let us realise that we have held India by integrity, justice, disinterested efficiency—­and, above all, by goodwill—­and let us continue to co-operate with India in India for India on these same lines.

EGYPT

BY J.A.  SPENDER

Editor of the Westminster Gazette, 1896 to 1922; Member of the Special Mission to Egypt, 1919-1920.

Mr. Spender said:—­The Egyptian problem resembles the Indian and all other Eastern problems in that there is no simple explanation or solution of it.  Among the many disagreeable surprises which awaited us after the war, none was more disagreeable than the discovery in March, 1919, that Egypt was in a state of rebellion.  For years previously we had considered Egypt a model of imperial administration.  We had pulled her out of bankruptcy and given her prosperity.  We had provided her with great public works which had enriched both pasha and fellah.  We had scrupulously refrained from exploiting her in our own interests.  No man ever worked so disinterestedly for a country not his own as Lord Cromer for Egypt, and if ever a Nationalist movement could have been killed by kindness, it should have been the Egyptian.  Nor were the Egyptian people ungrateful.  I have talked to Egyptian Nationalists of all shades, and seldom found any who did not handsomely acknowledge what Great Britain had done for Egypt, but they asked for one thing more, which was that she should restore them their independence.  “We won it from the Turks,” they said, “and we cannot allow you to take it from us.”

This demand was no new thing, but it was brought to a climax by events during and after the war.  When the war broke out, our representative in Egypt was still only “Agent and Consul-General,” and was theoretically and legally on the same footing with the representative of all other Powers; when it ended, he was “High Commissioner,” governing by martial law under a system which we called a “protectorate.”  This to the Egyptians seemed a definite and disastrous