The Egyptian Problem

vi THE SECOND PHASE OF THE OCCUPATION 119
incited them to waste their nascent energies on vain denunciation of the British controlling power, that alone stood between them and the revival of the old methods of Khedivial misrule from which Egypt had been rescued by British intervention.
So when Lord Kitchener left Cairo for England in the early summer of 1914 he went home determined to get the Khedive's claws effectively clipped, and, should he prove recalcitrant, to face the necessity of removing him. The war brought Lord Kitchener's great career to a tragic close, and Abbas made an end of himself as Khedive by throwing off the mask he had so long and too successfully worn and siding openly with our enemies when the war broke out. But the mischief he had done remained, and if for reasons inherent to the system itself, or from the general tendency of a bureaucracy to supineness and self-satisfied arrogance, the second phase of the Occupation was marked by an appreciable deterioration in the quality of British control, it was the sinister influence of the Khedive Abbas that more than anything else cast a blight upon it.
The Great War came and found the machine ill-prepared for the tremendous strain that was to be put upon it. As long as the war lasted martial law supplied a driving power which, however baneful were the aftereffects, kept it going under the highest conceivable pressure. It was not till the war was over that it plainly displayed internal signs of collapse.so common amongst all Turco-Egyptians for the fellaheen, as they are apt to call all who are of unmixed Egyptian descent, he contrived to rob Egyptian Nationalism of its best elements by instilling into it an anti-foreign and more specifically anti-British virus. Brought up in Vienna to despise Parliamentary institutions and to believe in the divine right of kings and Khedives, he succeeded in perverting the immature representative bodies we had called into existence in Egypt, and lest they should grow to be a check upon his own arbitrary tendencies, heiscretion which he began to urge on his august master's credit was the visit which heocialf light railways and the introduc