Mr. Chamberlain delivered a remarkable speech in West Birmingham on
Monday, in which he announced that, for reasons reprinted textually elsewhere, he had changed his opinion that it would be well for the British to evacuate Egypt. It would be a shameful dereliction of duty to retire from the great work we were doing there, work which would, if completed, terminate the misery of centuries. Mr. Chamberlain spoke with the utmost frankness, directly confessing previous error, and has evidently been con- verted by seeing with his own eyes what an Asiatic tyranny actually means for the people subjected to it, and how low down among the population that tyranny penetrates. It is not mere mismanagement which prevails, but direct oppression. " In Egypt, torture prevailed almost universally. The bastinado was used upon every occasion ; was used to extort the payment of taxes ; was used to obtain confession of crime ; was used to secure respect for authority and for the position of every village tyrant and every provincial governor. You had a system of forced labour, called the corvee, that was intended originally to maintain works of irrigation, to keep clear the canals, by which the great system of watering the country was carried out. This had been abused as everything else had been abused, and hundreds and thousands of men were taken from their own work in order to labour on the land of others." This system will come back, must come back, if we retire,—unless, indeed, the country is handed over to another European Power.
Previous page
