Sudan will improve it will never be an Egypt, but it will pay its way. But, before all things, you must give it time to repopulate itself. Well, then, if Egypt is not to get good places for her people, and is to be out of pocket for administration-how much does Egypt profit by the fall of Abdullahi and the reconquest of the Sudan? Much. Inestimably. For as the master-gain of England is the vindication of her self-respect, so the master-gain of Egypt is the assurance of her security. As long as dervish raiders loomed on the horizon of her frontier, Egypt was only half a State. She lived on a perpetual war-footing. Her finances are pinched enough at the best; every little economy had to go to the Sirdar. Never was general so jealous-even miserly—of public money as the Sirdar; but even so he was spending Egypt's all. That strain will henceforth be loosened. Egypt will have enough work for five years in the new barrages, which are a public work directly transliterable in pounds and piastres. Egypt will be able to give a little attention to her taxes, which are anomalous; to her education, which is backward; to her railways, which are vile. Whether she will be able to reduce her army is doubtful. The occupation of the banks of the Blue and White Nile, to say nothing of the peaceful reabsorption of Kordofan and Darfur, would open up some of the finest raw fighting material in the world. Frankly, it is very raw indeed-the rawest savagery you can THE GAIN OF EGYPT. 323 well imagine, but British officers and sergeants have made fairly drilled troops, fairly good shots, superb marchers and bayonet-fighters out of the same material, and they could do it again. To put the matter brutally, having this field for recruiting, we have too many enemies in the world to afford to lose it. We have made the Egyptian army, and we have saved Egypt with it and with our own: we should now make of it an African second to our Indian army, and use it, when the time comes, to repay the debt to ourselves. We have saved Egypt, and thereby we have paid another debt. The Khedive is but half a monarch at the best while a hostile force sat on his borders to destroy him, and every couple of years actually came down to do it, he was not more than a quarter. There was plenty of sneaking sympathy with Mahdism in Egypt even in Cairo, and not very far from the Khedive's own palace. But for British help the sympathisers would long ago, but yet too late, have recognised their foolishness in the obliteration of Egypt. Egypt alone could by no miracle have saved herself from utter destruction by Mahdist invasion. We have saved her-and therewith we have paid off the purblind, sincere undertakings of Mr Gladstone. We undertook to leave Egypt; we have redeemed the promise in an unforeseen manner, but we have redeemed it amply. If we undertook to evacuate the old Egypt, we have fathered a new one, saved from imminent extinction by our gold and our sword. Without us there would have been no Egypt to-day; what we made we shall keep. That is our double gain-the vindication of our own honour and the vindication of our right to go on making Egypt a country fit to live in. Egypt's gain is her existence to-day. The world's gain is the downfall of the worst tyranny in the world, and the acquisition of a limited opportunity for open trade. The Sudan's gain is immunity from rape and torture and every extreme of misery. The poor Sudan! The wretched, dry Sudan! Count up all the gains you will, yet what a hideous irony it remains, this fight of half a generation for such an emptiness. People talk of the Sudan as the East; it is not the East. The East has age and colour; the Sudan has no colour and no age-just a monotone of squalid barbarism. It is not a country; it has nothing that makes a country. Some brutish institutions it has, and some bloodthirsty chivalry. But it is not a country it has neither nationality, nor history, nor arts, nor even natural features. Just the Nile-the niggard Nile refusing himself to the desert-and for the rest there is absolutely nothing to look at in the Sudan. Nothing grows green. Only yellow halfagrass to make you stumble, and sapless mimosa to tear your eyes; dom-palms that mock with wooden fruit, and Sodom apples that lure with flatulent poison. For beasts it has tarantulas and scorpions and serpents, devouring white ants, and every kind A HIDEOUS IRONY. 325 of loathsome bug that flies or crawls. Its people are naked and dirty, ignorant and besotted. It is a quarter of a continent of sheer squalor. Overhead the pitiless furnace of the sun, under foot the nevereasing treadmill of the sand, dust in the throat, tuneless singing in the ears, searing flame in the eye,-the Sudan is a God-accursed wilderness, an empty limbo of torment for ever and ever. Surely enough, "When Allah made the Sudan,” say the Arabs, "he laughed." You can almost hear the fiendish echo of it crackling over the fiery sand. And yet and yet there never was an Englishman who had been there, but was ready and eager to go again. "Drink of Nile water," say the same Arabs, "and you will return to drink it again." Nile water is either very brown or very green, according to the season; yet you do go back and drink it again. Perhaps to Englishmen-half-savage still on the pinnacle of their civilisation-the very charm of the land lies in its empty barbarism. There is space in the Sudan. There is the fine, purified desert air, and the long stretching gallops over its sand. There are the things at the very back of life, and no other to posture in front of them,-hunger and thirst to assuage, distance to win through, pain to bear, life to defend, and death to face. You have gone back to the spring water of your infancy. You are a savage again—a savage with Rosbach water, if there is any left, and a Mauser repeating pistol-carbine, if the sand has not jammed |