REBELLION

349

pillage in the bazaars, and of the murder of inoffensive
tradesmen. Unfortunate Syrians and Armenians,
terrified by these rumours, deserted their shops and
homes, and fled into the desert for safety. The Civil
Administration met the trouble half-heartedly and
irresolutely. One day an advertised demonstration
would be forbidden to march through the streets;
a few hours later the prohibition would be withdrawn
and police officers ordered to march at the head of the
procession. There was small doubt now that the
arrest of Saad Zaghlul and his lieutenants had pro-
duced precisely the opposite effect anticipated by the
authors of the act. Far from checking the growth of
trouble, it had excited an outburst so fierce, that
the Egyptian Government was constrained to confess
their inability to control it, and virtually forced to
surrender their responsibility to military authority,

The help of the latter was invited none too soon.
Disorder, confined at first to Cairo, was spreading fast
up and down the valley of the Nile. Robbery and
violence were reported from everywhere, and the
savage and unprovoked slaughter of unarmed jEnglish-
men at Deirut was a crowning outrage. The fefiahin
set no limit to their barbarity. Suffocating with pent-
up passion, they had lost temporarily all sense of
reason, and anarchy reigned in the land. Representa-
tives of the Central Government found none to obey
their orders; self-elected bodies, calling themselves
Committees of Public Safety, usurped the functions
of authority in the towns, and Soviets of Sheikhs ruled
in the villages. Everywhere there was a mad 'desire
to destroy. The banks of irrigation canals were cut,
the permanent way of the State Railways was torn up,
the stations and signal boxes were burnt, and the
dwelling-places of Europeans razed to the ground.

If His Majesty's Government were surprised to
discover that their refusal to receive Saad Zaghlul was