Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [40]
For some reason, possibly relating to Edward’s death, he had abandoned his grand design. But Arthur Lee was delighted to see the former prime minister and former president hitting it off. Their minds, in his own expression, “fizzed chemically.”
The other guests at Chequers that weekend—Field Marshal Earl Roberts of Kandahar, Alfred Lyttelton M.P., and Cecil Spring Rice—shared a gloomy sense of Britain’s imperial decline. Roosevelt took advantage of their presence to discuss his forthcoming speech on Egypt.
“I never heard a man talk so continuously, or eloquently about himself,” Balfour’s secretary J. S. Sandars wrote afterward. “Amusing too after his fashion. He said that if we allowed Egypt to slip, as it was doing, out of our control, the first consequence would be seen in India.”
WHICH WAS MORE or less what Roosevelt said again at the Guildhall the following Tuesday, ignoring the stares of the Lord Mayor of London and his red-robed aldermen. They had just awarded him the freedom of the city, and had not expected a lecture in return. But he was no longer an ambassador, and felt it his duty to help King George and other defenders of the Empire.
He said he had just spent nearly a year in four British protectorates on the African continent. “You are so very busy at home that I am not sure whether you realize just how things are, in some places at least, abroad.”
This allusion to the crisis in Parliament got a few nervous laughs. In venturing some advice about handling native unrest along the Nile, he said, he wished only to pass on what he had learned himself, as President, during the Philippines insurrection. “You have given Egypt the best government it has had for at least two thousand years—probably a better government than it has ever had before; for never in history has the poor man in Egypt, the tiller of the soil, the ordinary laborer, been treated with as much justice and mercy.… Yet recent events, and especially what has happened in connection with and following on the assassination of Boutros Pasha three months ago, have shown that, in certain vital points, you have erred; and it is for you to make good your error.”
Sir Edward Grey, sitting on the dais with Balfour and Arthur Lee, whispered delightedly, “This will cause a devil of a row.” Some other distinguished guests, including Conan Doyle and John Singer Sargent, applauded more out of surprise than gratification. Were they being spoken to, or scolded?
Britain’s “error,” Roosevelt explained, lay in doing too much, rather than too little, to appease Egyptian feelings. “Uncivilized peoples” needed education and example. Fanatics in their midst throve on softhearted concessions. The willingness of Egyptian Nationalists to engage in sedition and murder had shown that they had no real understanding of democratic process. They would make “a noxious farce” of independence, if it was granted any time soon. “Of all broken reeds,” Roosevelt declared, “sentimentality is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean.”
Scattered cheers were heard as he grew more peremptory:
Such are the conditions; and where the effort made by your officials to help the Egyptians toward self-government is taken advantage of by them … to try to bring murderous chaos upon the land, then it becomes the primary duty of whoever is responsible for the government in Egypt to establish order, and to take whatever measures are necessary to that end. [“Hear! Hear!”]
… Now, either you have the right to be in Egypt or you have not. Either it is or it is not your duty to establish and keep order. [“Hear! Hear!”] If you feel that you have not the right to be in Egypt, if you do not wish to establish and to keep order there, why, then, by all means get out of Egypt. [“Hear! Hear!”]
“I just love that man,” Balfour said afterward.
WHEN ROOSEVELT CAME DOWN to breakfast next morning, Lee greeted him with, “Well, the attitude of the English newspapers can best be expressed in the one word ‘gasp.’ ”
Liberal newspapers were infuriated that a foreigner, however distinguished,