vin CLAIM TO "COMPLETE INDEPENDENCE'
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gation, that two Egyptian Ministers were not sufficiently responsible persons to be furnished with passports. But the answer they received, though couched, of course, in more courteous terms and expressing polite regret that the British Ministers were too much engrossed in the preoccupations of the Peace Conference to find time for discussing Egyptian affairs, was in effect the same. Their proposal was negatived. E/ushdi Pasha, who had been in office all through the war, and the whole Cabinet with him, resigned on March 1st.
The excitement in Egypt grew fierce. The very reason given for the refusal to receive the Egyptian Ministers made it the more galling, for the most moderate Egyptians already resented the exclusion of Egypt from the Paris Conference. Those most friendly to England argued that if the Protectorate had been designed to bring her within the fold of the British Empire, she was a sufficiently important partner in the Empire to be allowed some special representation in Paris. Others contended that the mere fact of her international status having been forcibly changed during the war gave her as good a title to have a seat at the Conference table as any of the new States that had sprung out of the war, especially when the Emir Feisal was seen to take his seat there, at the instance of the British Plenipotentiaries, as the representative of the newly-made King of the Hedjaz, whose people the Egyptians not unnaturally regarded as standing on a far lower level of civilisation and power than themselves. Nor did it escape notice that whilst the Egyptian Delegation were refused passports, deputations bound on analogous errands from Cyprus and from Syria were allowed to travel without let or hindrance to Europe.
A tremendous impetus was thus given to the agitation already in progress throughout the country in support of the full programme of Egyptian independence. Zaghlul had developed it with his customary eloquence early in January, in a speech delivered at a gathering in.
L 2 <l, financial, and professional interests, which could not be left entirely in the hands of Egyptian legislators so long as the Egyptians themselves took scarcely any part in the economic activities of the country. No particular