أوراق مطبوعة عن الوضع السياسي والسياسة العسكرية في مصر [ظ‎‎٨‎٥] (١٧٦/١٧٠)

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The Sarwat group look upon themselves, and are regarded by the party, as a
detachment holding and consolidating a position until the proper moment arrives for
the main body of tiieir Iriends to come to their support and to absorb them. They
have met with a fair measure of success. They inspire the respect which is associated
with fear, but not the veneration in which Zaghlui Pasha is held by his supporters,
or the respect which Adly Pasha enjoys for hi.s probity and dignity. They have not
the qualities which command popular favour, and their equivocal and petty methods ot
administration have alienated the. personal sympathies of many of the p.irty, and
aroused discontent among the Government officials. *
The moment when they will merge into the main body of the party has been
intended, if 1 rightly understand their plans, to be after the elections, though there is
a recent tendency to bedeve that a more opportune time might be upon the King’s )
signature of the Constitution. What I have hitherto loosely termed a “ party ” is
intended to become more organic under the leadership of Adly Pasha, who is already
maturing his plans, in association with such men as Mohammed Mahmud Pasha,
Hassan Abdul Razik Pasha, Lutti B^y-el-Sayed, Dr. Hafiz Atifi and Mohammed Ali
Bey, four of them members of the original Zaghlulist Wafi. They have founded a
newspaper, which, it is stated, already has 15,000 shareholders, and which is expected
to start publication on the 23rd October. The details cf the party programme will
then become known. I observe that in some quarters in England the assumption is
made that because Adly Pasha is founding a party he is withdrawing bis support from
the Sarwat Ministry. I believe there is no ground for this assumption. The scheme,
I am given to understand, is for the party to make its electoral campaign in collubora^
tion with the Government, and, if their anticipations are fulfilled, for Sarwat Pasha to
resign after the elections, with a view to Adly Pasha, as the leader of the victorious
party, becoming Piime Minister and presumably finding an important place in his
Ministry for Sarwat. They count, through the backing of the landed classes, upon the
election and support of the strong country candidate in all or nearly all the rural
constituencies, and upon a sweeping victory over the Zaghlulists.
They are, I sus, ect, over-confident ; and indeed Adly Pasha himself, who is
always more prone to see his difficulties than the way out of them, seemed in a recent
conversation with me to be lass liappy than, fur instance, the Ministers or Mohammed
Mahmud Pasha, and was seeking for j-ome possible means of conciliating the more *
moderate Zaghlulists. But, on the whole, unless any important new factor is
introduced, the omens seem favourable. 1 should here observe that Mohammed
Mahmud Pasha’s future attitude is open to some doubt, fie is on the wing of the
Adly P'«rty and noticeably critical, in conversation, of the Sarwat Administration.
The Zaghlulist Party is no longer what it was. Its men of mark are in exile and
their feebler successors are in prison. The exiscence of a Wafd ” is now hardly felt,,
and though money is found for engaging counsel in England to contest the legality of
Zaghlul Pasha’s detention, it is supposed that the party func.s are much depleted. All
the hopes of the party are centred in the return of Zaghlul Pasha to Egypt. He is
still the idol of the populace, the beloved leader of a gieat part of the professional
classes, and to the wilder students a martyr. To most landowners, on the other, hand,
he is still a bogey, and to the fellaheen either a vague hero of their race or an ominous
destroyer of the foundations of their existence. And yet he is a little faded. To some
of his followers, such as Amin Bey Yusuf and M. Louis Fanous, it now seems desirable
to paint him in new colours as the true partisan of an understanding with Great
Britain ; but they have been disowned by the managers of the party in Egypt for
painting a picture which contrasts too violently with the hostility to Great Britain
unremittingly expressed by the party organs in Egypt.
There is evidence, however, of a tendency in the Zaghlulist Party to divide into
two wings—united by their veneration of Zaglilul and their animosity to the present
Ministry, but divided in their view of the relations of Egypt to Great Britain. A large
proportion of prominent Copts appear to remain faithful to Zaghlul, presumably on the *
strength of the guarantees which he is believed to have personally given to them, and
many of these are to be found on the more moderate wing.
Not only has. the party lost much of its active force through the absence of its i
leaders, but the public mind seems to have became gradually less responsive to its
activities; even among the students the high political tension of the last four years
has appreciably relaxed. Annual occasions which the Zaghlulists are accustomed to
celebrate have this year been more tamely recognised; the majority of the telegrams
which poured out of Egypt when Zaghlul arrived at Gibraltar were signed, though
nominally sometimes on behalf of large bodies of people, by individuals of little