"LEST WE FORGET!" 241

the rights of small nations trampled under by the imperial
aggressor, whether Turkish or English: for the sanctity of life
in the hill villages of Afghanistan and in the veldt farms of the
Transvaal. "Amidst the din of preparation for warfare in the rime
of peace," Gladstone declared in his final speech at Edinburgh,
"there is going on a profound mysterious movement -that,
whether we will or not, is bringing the nations of the civilised
world, as well as the uncivilised, morally as well as physically
nearer to one another; and making them more and more
responsible before God for one another's welfare."

The truth of this could not be resolved by statesmen. Its
force lay in the fact that in his heart the ordinary Englishman
believed it. The defeated and now dying Disraeli, whom the
harsh experience of his race and a long life of struggle had made
a realist, might have replied that there was no such instrument
for bringing it about as the united and consistent policy of a
world-wide commonwealth of peace-loving British nations. :

Because Englishmen wished to exercise power not for its
own sake but to further moral causes, Gladstone, on assuming
office in 1880, found himself involved in remote imperial adven-
tures. Having no imperial policy, he was at a loss in meeting
them. Among the charges brought against Disraeli by his
opponents had been that of scheming to occupy Egypt. Yet
it was Gladstone who actually and most reluctantly did so.

Egypt was an independent tributary province of the Turkish
Empire. In 1876, being unable to wring any more out of his
over-taxed people or to raise further capital to pay the interest
on his debts, its ruler, the spendthrift Khedive Ismail, agreed to
the appointment of a British and a French Controller-General
of Finance to safeguard the hundred million pounds he had
borrowed from French and British capitalists. Three years later
as Ismail, unable to break with his prodigal habits, intrigued
against his financial advisers, Britain and France induced his over-
lord, the Sultan of Turkey, to depose him in favour of his son.

This measure of foreign financial control was enough to
provoke the resentment of the Egyptian aristocracy and army.
In 1882 a military adventurer named Arabi Pasha established a
military dictatorship, and the Alexandria mob beat up and
murdered foreigners. Save for remote outbreaks in China, the
world was still unused to such popular jackboot reactions to the