132 A Short History of the Middle East
ignorance did much to aggravate the grievances of the National-
ists. The country was flooded with inexperienced British army
officers and civil officials who treated Egypt, now proclaimed a
British protectorate, almost as an occupied territory in which the
rights and wishes of the inhabitants counted for little. The shortage
of man-power and of transport for the Palestine campaign led to
the conscription of thousands of fellahin for the Labour Corps and
the Camel Transport Corps, and the requisitioning of their draught-
animals. Although such measures were theoretically regulated to
cause the minimum hardship—the conscription period, for exam-
ple, was limited to six months—their execution was largely left,
owing to the heavy demand on British personnel for the Army, to
Egyptian provincial and local officials, who naturally, applied
them with a view to their own profit: the fellah who paid the
necessary bakhshish to the village 'umda was exempt from con-
scription or requisitioning; the fellah who could not or would not
pay found himself included in the conscription-list for one six
months' period after another, and his camel or donkey carried
away by the requisitioning authorities. The fellahin were thus
filled with a strong sense of injury, and blamed the British all the
more because, under their rule, they had acquired some measure of
personal liberty and had lost some of their servile respect for
authority and the patient endurance of oppression. The urban
population was made discontented by the shortage of imported
supplies, especially of cereals in a country whose profitable cotton-
growing had to a great extent supplanted grain; and they were
offended by the tactless collection of subscriptions for the Red
Cross, from a predominantly Muslim population and by methods
which locally sometimes approximated to compulsion. Politically-
minded Egyptians were fiirther irritated by the establishment of
the Protectorate, which seemed to make the prospect of self-
government more remote. The kind of post-war constitution
which senior British officials in Egypt envisaged was exemplified
by a Note on Constitutional Reform drawn up by the Judicial
Adviser, which leaked out to the Cairo press despite the censor-
ship. It 'entirely ignored the existence of the national sentiment
which the War had stimulated .. . and did not spare the deficien-
cies of the politically-minded classes in an incisive review of their
past activities. It proposed the creation of a new legislature in
whose upper chamber, the Senate, not only British Advisers and