This want of intelligence is easily illustrated. Take, for instance, the question of farming accounts. Here squires and farmers have much to learn; at public schools elementary mathematics are neglected, and it is notorious that most farmers keep no accounts, in the proper sense of the term, at all. Yet a colliery proprietor, a manufacturer, or a shopkeeper who kept no books would be considered insane. Hear what Mr. Westley Richards, who combines practical experience as a manufacturer and as a farmer, has to say on the subject: 'Unless farmers keep proper accounts, it is impossible for them to meet the present foreign competition, as they cannot tell, when losses occur, where it is that they have occurred. Their banker's book only tells them that they have lost, and are so much poorer, but it does not tell them where they have lost, and it is this they want to know.' In short, it is self-evident that farming cannot, any more than any other business, be properly conducted without regular accounts and balance sheets. Farming is eminently a business of small economies, and accounts are therefore of particular importance. Hitherto the Board of Agriculture have done nothing in the matter. No single form of accounts would suit the whole of the country; but if the Board would prepare a simple model form for each of the groups of counties which figure in the Agricultural Returns, and settle the form for each group in concert with the County Councils interested, they would confer a boon. on landlords and tenants alike. For the purposes of the incometax, a simple printed form of account of profit and loss has already been provided by the Inland Revenue Commissioners, and may be obtained from any surveyor of taxes. With the income-tax at 8d., it is worth while to know that persons who have sustained loss by farming operations may obtain repayment of the tax paid under Schedules B or D, and also a proportionate amount of the tax paid in respect of their income (if any) derived from sources other than the occupation of land.* There are already signs that the necessity for special training in the business of a landlord and a farmer is recognized, and steps are being taken to supply the want. The University of Cambridge, for example, in co-operation with the County Councils of Cambridge, Essex, Hunts, Leicestershire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, and Suffolk, has organized a course of scientific instruction in subjects bearing on agriculture, which is as open to owners as to occupiers of the land. The Board of Agriculture has made a grant to supplement the contributions of the 2-93 * See Board of Agriculture Memorandum A Farmers and the Income Tax. Every landlord and tenant ought to have a copy of this Memorandum. County County Councils interested; and during the year ending March 1894 the sum of 5907. was expended in the stipends of lecturers on agricultural chemistry, book-keeping, botany, geology, physics, physiology, and entomology. The course extends over two years, and various scholarships are offered by some of the County Councils. The whole scheme, under an executive committee of which Mr. Pell is chairman, seems to be well and economically worked; and we trust that the example may be followed at Oxford and elsewhere. Great changes are taking place. From Parliament the propertied classes have nothing to hope and something to fear. Politically and socially their strength and hopes lie in administration, but their influence will for the future depend more and more on personal exertion, and less on rank or riches. Similarly, it has become necessary for the landed gentry to apply to the management of their own estates the abilities and courage which have been often diverted into other channels. No squire can now afford to be a drone, or so to live that at the last he shall be numbered with those who, looking back, Rather, it is to . . . see, for a moment, Stretching out, like the desert be hoped, he will follow in the footsteps of those who have put into practice the words of Tennyson " Move among your people, know them, follow him who led the way, Strove for sixty widowed years to help his homelier brother men ; Served the poor, and built the cottage, raised the school, and drained the fen.' Авт. ART. XI.-1. England in Egypt. London, 1894. By Alfred Milner, late 2. Egypt and the Egyptian Question. By Sir D. Mackenzie Wallace, K.C.I.E. London, 1883. 3. Egypt To-Day: the First to the Third Khedive. By W. Fraser Rae. London, 1892. 4. L'Egypte et l'Occupation Anglaise. Par Edmond Plauchut. Paris, 1889. 5. Blue Books (Egypt), 1882-1894. 6. Parliamentary Papers. FIFTY years ago young Arthur Kinglake on his travels wrote, "The Englishman, straining far over to hold his beloved India, will plant a firm foot on the banks of the Nile, and sit in the seats of the Faithful.'* In 1860 the same writer, speaking of the offer made by the Emperor Nicholas I. that England should share in a partition of Turkey by taking Egypt for herself, notes that such offers are not made among gentlemen. In 1894 Turkey is not partitioned, but England controls the affairs of Egypt. How has it come about? Have we taken upon us a burden devolved upon us by no act of our own, or have we adroitly accepted a bonus without the conditions? The former view is that which Englishmen naturally take of themselves. The latter is the foundation of the epithet perfide Albion. For England generally shifts to get out of the mire on the right side; and sometimes with some of the mud upon her. Or it may be put thus: that England means right and does right quite as often as other nations, perhaps oftener; but her loud integrity and her disregard of fine shades not unfrequently cause her good deeds to be evil spoken of. That she is envied more than she is feared is a just cause of pride, for it shows that she is not only powerful, but peaceful too. The spirit of Walpole rather than that of Chatham is the ruling spirit of our country. She loves to praise the one, but more willingly and wisely follows the other. Her leading instinct is that of commerce; but it is not divorced from justice and honesty. She has never made a foreign or a subject nation love her. But she has been respected by Americans, Germans, and Italians; and in all the corners of the globe she has ruled and still rules millions of coloured men, to whom she is a present Deity, not always benign but always venerable. Englishmen do not, as * Eothen,' chap. xx. a rule, a rule, seek for power, but when it comes in their way they accept it and like it; and the world is the better for it. This is our apology for holding the place in the world which we now occupy. The work which England does could be done by no other nation; but when we begin, we begin without a plan, and seldom know how we shall end. It has been in Egypt as in India, Africa, and America. And if it is not easy to reconcile the aims of our occupation with the conduct of affairs brought about by force of circumstances, we can challenge critics to point out where we have acted against the spirit of our obligations, or disregarded the interests of other nations. Our home critics are for the most part politicians of the Little England' persuasion: theorists, timid economists, parliamentary obstructors. The French nation, though with some reason unfriendly to our action and jealous of our ascendency, has never framed an indictment against us; and the other Powers of Europe are content to see England working in their interest. It is one of our chief guarantees that of all the nations of the world our gains are most uncertain and our losses most certain in the event of war. Europe feels safer with a British force in garrison at Alexandria than if France directed the councils of the Khedive, or if the Khedive were independent of direction. An impartial consideration of the events of the years 1879-83 will show, we believe, that though England did not then play the game of France as well as her own, and, it may be, treated her rather as an antagonist than as a partner, and allowed her mistakes to score in the game; nevertheless she played a fair game, marking no points which were not lawfully won, and at the end taking less than the stakes; and this in the face of great difficulties and under strong temptation to improve for private ends a situation which, as accepted, was so full of hindrances as to present an almost hopeless task. The facts are shortly these. Ismail Pacha, the grandfather of the present Khedive, who (one may hope) has spent his leisure at Constantinople in a penitent retrospect of his indiscretions, was a princely Windham or Ailesbury. By beginning and leaving unfinished ill-considered and enormously expensive public works, and by private extravagances on a scale which would have ruined Aladdin, he incurred debts to the amount of more than one hundred millions sterling; and in such a manner as to get as little money as possible for his own spending, and to make Egypt a 'swindlers' paradise.' So gigantic was Ismail's unthrift, and so ingeniously did he multiply the number of his creditors, that at length the whole world world was interested in his affairs. Forgetting the fable of the Horse and the Stag, he called in European advisers. Mr. Goschen and M. Joubert, Mr. Rivers Wilson and M. de Blignières, went to Egypt to set things right. Ismail tried one plan and another, recalled Nubar Pasha from exile and banished him again, appointed European Ministers and dismissed them. He thought himself once more King of Egypt. He found himself Roi de néant. Bismarck touched a spring, his Suzerain the Sultan telegraphed, and Ismail was no more. For two years from the accession of his son Tewfik, a Dual Control or Condominium existed; M. de Blignières being the French Controller, Major Baring (now Lord Cromer) his colleague. It was nominally a financial arrangement, practically an AngloFrench Protectorate, and it worked well on the whole, although its working at all was dependent on friendly relations between the two Powers and the two Ministers united in a common work, but without the certainty of a common interest,-a condition therefore of unstable equilibrium. One result of this new state of things was that French influence in Egypt increased. We accepted equal responsibility without equal power. We were soon to learn what responsibility meant. The military and nationalist insurrection under Arabi in 1882 upset all calculations. We have not space to discuss the question whether Arabi's revolt can be called a national movement or not; indeed, such a phrase may be unmeaning. There are probably few countries, says Mr. Milner, in which patriotic sentiment counts for less than it does in Egypt. The national aspirations of the Egyptian may be summed up in a dislike of Europe, of Christians, native or foreign, and of money-lenders, whether Copt, Italian, Greek, or Jew. Their thoughts move in a narrow circle, they are occupied with their farms, and how to make a living out of them after satisfying the tax-gatherer and the usurer.' They are emotional, obsequious, and submissive'; † neither turbulent nor fanatical; the most easily governed people in the world,' say all the authorities, only wishing to know whom to obey.' Arabi claimed their obedience, announced a Holy War, promised to wipe off their debts and banish the foreigners and the usurers, and ruled Egypt for a few weeks with undisputed authority. He squeezed the sponge once more, worked the fellahîn by corvée, ate up what the locust and the cankerworm had left, drove them into his army, led them to battle and defeat, and at * * Mr. H. Villiers Stuart's Report: Parl. Papers, Egypt, No. 7 (1883). the |