The Struggle for Independence 167
nor could the good administration and development of the Sudan
be jeopardized. Zaghlul showed himself as inflexible as ever in
negotiation, and returned to Egypt without achieving anything.
Meanwhile his government had made gestures hostile to the
presence of the British garrison and the position of the Sirdar, the
British commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Army. On 19
November the Skdar, Sir Lee Stack, was murdered in the streets of
Cairo. On his own initiative Allenby presented to the Egyptian
government an ultimatum in which the following were the
principal demands:
(1) The withdrawal from the Sudan of all Egyptian officers and
purely Egyptian units, which had been inciting the Sudanese troops
to mutiny, with some effect.
(2) Egyptian consent to the unlimited irrigation of the Sudanese
cotton-growing district of the Gazira, which had previously been
limited to ensure adequate water-supplies to Egypt.
(3) Payment of a fine of .£500,000.
The British colony in Egypt, prone as ever to 'Egyptophobia',
was indignant at the 'weakness* of Allenby's ultimatum; but the
Foreign Office instructed him to moderate the second and third of
the above demands; and there is no doubt that the threat to divert
Nile water from Egypt for unlimited irrigation in the Sudan has,
in spite of subsequent agreement on this vital subject, left Egyptians
with the uncomfortable realization that the water supplies on
which their economy depends are at Britain's mercy as long as she
remains in control of the Sudan.
The Lee Stack murder was the culmination of the murder-
campaign, in which a number of the younger Wafd leaders1 were
charged with criminal complicity. The Wafd government fell,
leaving the ground free for King Fuad to take a more active part
in the country's politics. The son of Isma'il and now in the prime
of his life, he had inherited enough of the autocratic spirit of his line
not to accept tamely the limited authority of a constitutional
monarch. As a Europeanized Turk who spoke but indifferent
Arabic, he despised the middle-class Egyptian politicians of the
Wafd, and their demagogic appeal to the city-rabble and the ig-
norant rural masses. The greatest landowner in Egypt, he rnis-
1 These included Mahmud Fahmi an-Nuqrashi, now Prime Minister. They
were acquitted by a majority of two Egyptian judges to one British judge, who
resigned in protest.
M