ENGLAND, EGYPT, AND THE SUDAN CHAPTER I THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE KHEDIVATE THE LAND of Egypt has been from time immemorial the temptation and the spoil of the conqueror. Its singular fertility, its defenceless position, and the weakness of a native race of inhabitants whom it has never been possible, until quite recent years, to organise for the purposes of self-protection, have attracted by turn every powerful military people in its neighbourhood, whether European, Asiatic, or African. The long history of its Ancient and Middle and New Empires is the history of successive conquests and dominations, now by African potentates and communities dwelling to the South, and now by subjugated races who rose against their conquerors. Asia, and afterwards Europe, have subjected her to the same experience. When Persia was a power overshadowing Eastern Europe, Egypt fell under her yoke; and when, after two hundred years of Persian rule, the third Darius came into collision with the all-conquering king of Macedon, Egypt passed from Asiatic into European hands. The ascent of Rome to the lordship of the Western World was the signal for another change in her rulers, and four centuries of Ptolemies were succeeded by more than six centuries of Cæsars. With the rise of Islam, in the seventh century of the Christian era, the country passed once more under the sway of a new A conqueror, and it was not till after nearly nine centuries of Arab sovereignty that the last king of the Mameluke dynasty was defeated by the Sultan of the invaders who had made themselves masters of Constantinople, and Egypt became a Turkish Pashalik. The long period of external peace which succeeded to the last conquest was mainly due to the neglect of Egypt by the great Powers-engaged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in wars of religion, wars of colonial rivalry, and wars of dynastic dispute; while the gradual decline in the strength and menace of her Ottoman suzerain was already beginning to draw the jealous and anxious attention of the European States to a point farther to the East. Otherwise, the growing weakness of Turkey and the practical subordination of her nominal viceroys to the Mameluke Beys who governed the various Egyptian provinces, collected the taxes, commanded the militia, and merely paid tribute to the Pasha, would doubtless have earlier merited an attempt from one or other of the great Powers to wrest this rich and historic domain of the Ottoman from his gradually failing hands. Late in the eighteenth century the time arrived. The greatest and greediest of all the conquerors of the world, looking eastward for a new empire, and for a basis of attack upon the eastern dominion of his most formidable foe, cast the eye of desire upon Egypt, and there and then began the rivalry for its possession, or, failing possession, for paramount influence therein, which has arrayed France and England against each other ever since. The "sentimental" claim, however, which the French people consider to have been created in their favour by the Consul of 1798-1801, must be regarded as deriving rather from their romantic attachment to the memory of their great soldier, than from any very proud memories of the events themselves. For assuredly the glories of the Napoleonic expedition are not of the brightest. Napoleon's victory over the Mamelukes |