began, without doctrinairism; and it is often the most high-souled and self-sacrificing members of a party who, in the bitterness of repeated disappointment, commit themselves to unpractical and fatal theories. It must be admitted, however, we think, by candid people, that if, for instance, the disestablishment of the Church has been the object of the Ritualists, they have been, as a party, singularly silent and patient for a long term of years under a form of government which has pressed with a continuous and great weight on them, and almost on them only. But in fact, although the Ritualists are, from the position which they have chosen to occupy, the chief sufferers, the present state of Church legislation is one which all true churchmen must feel to be deplorable, and to be one so opposed to all the instincts of justice-loving Englishmen that, were not the prejudices of all sections arrayed against the Ritualists, reform must ere now have been effected. No churchman can regard without great apprehension the dispensation of power granted to secular judges, who need not necessarily be Churchmen or even Christians, to decide intricate questions of Church doctrine and practice.

Nor again can an undignified spectacle, such as was seen a short time since, be regarded without pain, when a learned judge felt compelled to occupy a considerable portion of his judgments, by endeavouring to prove the authority of his court to be what three other learned judges had decided that it was not. And this too when, in the meantime, the unfortunate clergymen, who deem it to be their duty to refuse acknowledgment to the court in question on the very ground of its authority, may be suffering imprisonment or deprivation.

If indeed it be true that, in despair of justice or reform, the advanced party in the Church would, of two evils, prefer that the State should exercise its furthest limits of power, and deprive the Church of her inheritance, is it to be wondered at? Radical Reform is sometimes the only safeguard from revolution, and may become, under certain circumstances, the truest Conservatism. If the legitimate freedom of the Catholic Church in this land be indeed imperilled, and her foundations shaken by continued union with the State, the disaster of a final rupture of such union can only be postponed-it cannot be averted.

A. F. NORTHCOTE.

OUR EGYPTIAN PROTECTORATE.

THE more you get to know Egypt, the more, so it seems to me, you become impressed with the continuity of its history. After all, the Egypt of to-day is the Egypt of the Pharaohs, just as in their days it had changed but little from the Egypt of the Shepherd Kings. Dynasties may succeed each other: empires may rise and fall: one race of conquerors may be expelled by a new tide of invaders; but the Nile flows on for ever; and the flooded lands give forth their produce year by year, tilled by the same subject race toiling in the same fashion. What has been in the past will be in the future. Like causes must produce like results: and there is no reason one can see why scores of centuries hence, when our times have become as remote as those of Sesostris, Egypt should not still remain much as we know her now, a country whose history stretches back into the dim infancy of the world. Should this conception be realised, it is no fanciful assumption that in the far-away hereafter the Champollions of the future may out of obscure records, indited in forgotten languages, endeavour to reconstruct the history of Egypt during the era when the family of Mehemet Ali reigned over the valley of the Nile. Of the various problems as to the attributes, characteristics, and relations of the different Pharaonic dynasties which nowadays perplex the brains of Egyptologists, few, I think, are so difficult of solution as any attempt will prove on the part of their remote successors to define the status, nature, and reason of being of the Government established in Egypt upon the deposition of Ismail Pasha.

Very little light would be thrown upon the elucidation of this problem by the perusal of our Blue Books and State papers, even supposing them to be still accessible. Nor would any great information be obtained from contemporary writings. The new régime which has been established, or, to speak more correctly, is in the process of establishment, in Egypt, has excited very little attention abroad. Yet within the last few months a new chapter has been commenced in Egyptian history, a chapter whose subsequent pages must-unless the experience of Egypt should prove contrary to that of all other Oriental countries-record the ultimate establishment of European rule over the length and breadth of the country. We are, in fact, witnessing the inauguration of a direct European Protectorate over Egypt; and as

the part England has played in the establishment of the new system of administration is very important now, and is likely to be far more important in the future, it is worth while for Englishmen to understand what we have done and are doing in Egypt. To facilitate such an understanding is the object I have in view.

In order to make the present position of Egyptian affairs at all intelligible, it is necessary to revert to the period which preceded the deposition of the late Viceroy. When I last wrote on this subject in the pages of this Review, the downfall of the Wilson-De Blignières Ministry was imminent. No special foresight was required to prognosticate the coming collapse. The truth is, the corner-stone of the Anglo-French Ministry was knocked out with the dismissal of Nubar Pasha; and the two Governments practically consented to abandon the experiment when they agreed not to insist upon the reinstatement of the deposed Prime Minister. This consent no doubt was given under a misapprehension. Neither Lord Salisbury nor M. Waddington intended to surrender the control over the administration of Egypt afforded by the fact that the two chief posts in the Ministry were occupied by nominees of their respective Governments. They were, however, led to believe that the Khedive was willing to acquiesce cordially in the tutelage exercised by Mr. Wilson and M. de Blignières, if only he could be relieved from the presence of Nubar Pasha, who was obnoxious to him on personal grounds. In consequence, the two Powers contented themselves with placing formally on record the conditions on which they were prepared to allow the Khedive to exercise the right of dismissing his own Minister. In an official note addressed to the Khedive, England and France insisted that henceforward their representatives in the Ministry must have a distinct right of joint veto on any measures of which they might disapprove, and that the Khedive himself must not be permitted to be present at the Ministerial councils. It was impossible to lay down more clearly, in so far as phrases were concerned, the absolute ascendency over the administration of Egypt which England and France considered themselves entitled to claim. The Khedive acquiesced without a protest in the conditions imposed upon him, and shortsighted observers jumped to the conclusion that the attempt of Ismail Pasha to assert his independence by the dismissal of Nubar Pasha had ended in the virtual abdication of his authority into the hands of his English and French Ministers. This was the view taken by Mr. Vivian, our Consul-General in Egypt, and impressed by him upon our Foreign Office. Unfortunately, Orientals attach little value to words which are not accompanied by acts; and Ismail Pasha was in this respect a type of the Turkish official. The Khedive saw clearly that the Powers had shrunk from any practical step to vindicate their ascendency, which, as he was well aware, had been imperilled by the dismissal of Nubar Pasha, and had contented themselves with a verbal

protest. The natural inference was, that what he had done already he could do again, and that any further attempts to recover his independence would entail no greater penalty than a diplomatic reprimand. In this belief his Highness was confirmed by an unfortunate incident: I allude to the presence of Mr. Vivian in Cairo. I am anxious to say as little as may be in disparagement of a gentleman with whom my personal relations have always been of a friendly and pleasant character; and I also admit most fully that Mr. Vivian-in common, for that matter, with almost every other actor in the Egyptian imbroglio which ended with the deposition of Ismail Pasha-has never had the opportunity of laying his own case before the public. I cannot, however, give anything approaching to a true narrative of the course of recent events in Egypt without alluding to Mr. Vivian's action as the representative of England, an action which from my point of view was mistaken and mischievous. Now, it so happened that our Consul-General disapproved, with or without .reason, of Nubar Pasha's policy, and had used his influence to persuade his own Government to acquiesce in Nubar's dismissal by the Khedive. This view of Mr. Vivian's found no favour with the ex-Minister's European colleagues. They were convinced—and, as the event proved, they were right in their conviction-that Nubar's summary dismissal imperilled their own tenure of power, and they held that in the interest of the Anglo-French administration Nubar's reinstatement should have been insisted upon by the Governments of London and Paris. This antagonism of opinion between the English Consul and the English Finance Minister at Cairo was matter of notoriety in Egypt. It was known, too, that this divergence of view had unfortunately assumed an almost personal character. When, therefore, shortly after the acceptance of the Anglo-French ultimatum by the Khedive, and the appointment of a reconstituted Ministry under Prince Tewfik as President, Mr. Vivian left Egypt on a sudden journey to London, it was taken for granted that he would be replaced by a consul who would support and not oppose the Anglo-French element in the Egyptian Ministry. Mr. Vivian, on the other hand, was naturally anxious not to quit his post, and finally succeeded in inducing the Foreign Office to sanction his return to Egypt as representative of England. How far social, personal, or official considerations contributed to bring about this result, it is needless to inquire. The ruling desire of our Government with respect to Egypt at this period, as indeed at every subsequent period, was to keep things quiet and to avoid any crisis which might necessitate action or overt intervention on our part. Mr. Vivian contrived, as I believe, to impress our Foreign Office with a belief, in which he himself shared most honestly, that his own personal influence with the Khedive afforded the best guarantee against his Highness taking any step which might bring him into direct antagonism with England.

The belief was a complete delusion, but it was one into which a more astute diplomatist than Mr. Vivian might pardonably have fallen. I have seen enough personally of Ismail Pasha to realise how difficult it was to resist the persuasiveness of his manner. If it was his interest to win your confidence, he set about the work with a skill which almost amounted to genius. You might have the most profound conviction of his duplicity, and yet somehow you left his presence with an impression that he had recognised the folly of trying to deceive you, that he honestly looked upon you as a friend, and that he valued your good opinion and your judgment too highly to forfeit it by any of the intrigues to which he had resorted in dealing with men of less discernment of character and less knowledge of the world than you yourself possessed. There was no vulgar affectation of high motives or superior virtue about Ismail Pasha's studied confidence. It was as a man of the world speaking to a man of the world that he appealed to your confidence; and this appeal was seldom made in vain. At any rate, the Viceroy succeeded in impressing Mr. Vivian with a conviction that they thoroughly understood each other; and this conviction played a not unimportant part in the drama which ended in the deposition of the Khedive.

It is not my object in these pages to tell the story of the Egyptian crisis. The space required would far exceed the limits of an article; nor is the present the time when, to my thinking, such a story can be told with advantage. My aim is to explain how England has been driven by the force of circumstances to assume a position in Egypt which is tantamount to a Protectorate; and I only allude to the events of the last twelve months to explain the true character of our new position. The bugbear of a so-called 'national party' was raised in order to throw dust into the eyes of Europe. Sham demonstrations and fictitious protests were got up to support the pretence that publie opinion in Egypt was hostile to European administrators, and that the Khedive had no choice except to bow to public opinion. Finally, within two months of Ismail Pasha's solemn engagement to allow no measure to be passed without the approval of his Anglo-French Ministers, these Ministers were dismissed contemptuously.

In France the intelligence was received with an outburst of indignation. There was no disguising the fact that, after the note the two Powers had but just addressed to the Khedive, this summary defiance of their authority was almost an insult. The French are more susceptible than we are to diplomatic slights, and the Republic at the present moment is singularly sensitive to any disregard of the dignity of France. Great irritation had already been caused in Paris by a saying attributed to an Egyptian statesman, that 'la France est un cadavre, sur lequel on peut marcher,' and it was felt that under the Empire Egypt would never have dared to treat a French official with contumely. Moreover, financial interests