ment an alien institution like the franchise, in South Africa, you must make it a reality and not a mockery; and to introduce an honest franchise as a political engine of government without an educational system directed to making the individual worthy of exercising it, is merely to court trouble.
The problem which confronts the British in Egypt is a problem, too, wholly of their own creation. Before the Great War, one would have said that it could only be solved by giving to the Egyptians increased powers to administer the governing machine which has been established in their midst, coupled with the determination to cease paying a hypocritical lip-service to the ideal of self-government, and honestly to define the standards which would justify us, in the light of our own repeated professions and of our international pledges, in surrendering our trusteeship into the hands of the Egyptians themselves. One would have said the same, broadly speaking, of India. But the Great War has created conditions which have infused the problem with greater urgency and invested it with a new character, both in Egypt and in India. India lies outside the scope of this volume. In Egypt, political bungling and military brutality have combined to achieve the seemingly miraculous, in uniting the entire population against us. The British occupation no longer stands as the bulwark between an exploited peasantry and an exploiting ruling-class. Its directors have themselves exploited the peasantry for military and imperialistic purposes, and to the fellahin we appear to-day as chastisers with scorpions compared with the whips yielded by their former masters. Matters have reached such a pass that it seems extremely doubtful if we can now maintain ourselves in Egypt with any pretence of moral justification, even by the grant of immediate and extensive powers of self-government; and the position is likely to become completely untenable if the settlement of Asiatic Turkey is such as to outrage the feelings of Mohammedans throughout the British Empire. Egypt is only one of many proofs that the war has been a solvent of Empire, just as a genuine League of Nations must be, where Empire embraces real or nascent civilisations. The French are trying to solve a somewhat similar problem in Algeria by methods for which
