Goodwin's weekly : a thinking paper for thinking people. [volume], June 18, 1910, Image 1

About Goodwin's weekly : a thinking paper for thinking people. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1902-1919

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Goodwin's Weekly I
Vol. XVII SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, JUNE 18, 1910 No. 9 H
- i , . iIhbh
1 5.
The Coming Of The Colonel
H T is expected that Col. Roosevelt will return
J to his native city this morning. He can write
down in his diary that no other private citizen
. (ever had so many honors heaped upon him as he
has had since he went away; from the genuine"
f lions in the jungles to the titled and social lions
'. which give direction to European politics and
society. Yet we suspect that the domes and
' spired and sky-scrapers of New York City will,
j tor the moment at least, seem pleasanter than
i V anything that the lands beyond the sea were
able to present to him, for the word home is
; about the most significant one in any language,
and the traveler who nears his home after a
! considerable absence feels thrills in his soul that
all the "pomp and circumstances" of sovereign
! pictures and sovereign honors never awakened.
. His countrymen will give him a warm greet-
ing. The learned and wise will greet him as
one who, among the wise and learned of the
old world, maintained himself and the American
name with honor; the second class will say:
"In the arenas of the old world he held his
place an intellectual gladiator to be proud of";
while the third class will shout: "When they
were all trotted out Tie was the finest trick
1 pony in the ring."
The country will be curious to see in what
direction his restless energies will urn next.
Will he plunge into politics or will he seek the
quiet of Oyster Bay and rest? Or, after a little
rest, will ho plunge into literature and present
us with a book in the autumn beside his con
tributions to the Outlook during the summer?
(Or will he undertake all these stunts and in
his rest pauses go out lecturing to colleges and
different societies? He told England how to
i manage Egypt, we wonder if ho has any new
If theories of how things at home should be man-
aged?
L In many ways he is a most wonderful man and
f is bound to be more or less a concernment to his
countrymen.
y Judging by what he said at different times
in the old world we believe his present inten
tion is to assume the presidency of some great
- university and at the same time to keep per-
If petually before the world as editor of some
' magazine. If this proves to be the case, then
w the two occupations ought to hold him down to
rather steady work. Either one would do for an
X ordinary man, and then give him days at a time
5 when "Homer would nod."
I
P' The Guildhall Speech And Egypt
J r-r-iHE Guildhall speech of Col. Roosevelt is
1L, J not so bad when we come to study it. He
Ef praised British rule in East Africa, Uganda
and the Soudan, and when he reached Egypt he
fl praised much that had been done by the British
there, expressed the belief that Egypt was en-
joying better government now than she previous
I ly had for 2,000 years, getter probably than she
ft ever had. Then he prefaced what he proposed
T to say further by the statement that he felt .j
W ought to say it. Then he told his audience that
m the English were not in Egypt to guard their
K own Interests alone, but the guardians of clviliza-
tion, and that the present state of Egypt was
W a menace; that they had tried to do too much
R in that i country. He referred to the murder of
Boutros Pasha, and tnen said:
r
..
I,
In Egypt you have been treating all religions
with studied fairness and impartiality. Instead of
gratefully acknowledging this, a noisy section of
the native population takes advantage of what
your good treatment has done to bring about an
anti-foreign movement in which, as events have
shown, murder on a large or small scale is ex
pected to play a leading part. Boutros Pasha
was the best and most competent native Egyp
tian official, a steadfast upholder of English rule,
and an earnest worker for the welfare of his coun
trymen, and he was murdered simply and solely
because of those facts and because he did his duty
wisely, fearlessly and uprightly.
The attitude of the so called Egyptian Nation
alist party in connection with the murder has
shown that they were neither desirous nor cap
able of guaranteeing even that primary justice
the failure to supply which makes self-government
not merely empty but noxious. The praise
worthy effort made by your officials to help the'
Egyptians toward self-government Is taken ad
vantage of by them, not to make things better,
not to help their country, but to try to bring j up
on the land a chaos in which murder would be
one of the principal ingredients. It becomes,
therefore, the primary duty of whoever is re
sponsible for the government of Egypt to estab
lish order and take whatever measures are nec
essary to that end.
It was with this primary object of establish
ing order that you went into Egypt twenty-eight
years ago, and the chief and ample justification
for your presence in Egypt was this absolute ne
cessity of order being established from without,
coupled with your ability and willingness to es
tablish it. Now, either you have the right to be
in Egypt or you have not. Either it is or is not
your duty to establish and keep order. If you
feel you have not the right to be in Egypt, if you
do not wish to establish and keep order there,
why. then, by all means get out.
As I hope you feel that your duty to civilized
mankind and your fealty to your own great tra
ditions alike bid you to stay, then make the fact
and name agree; and show that you are ready
to meet in every deed the responsibility which
is yours.
It is the thing, not the form, which is vital.
If the present forms of government in Egypt, es
tablished by you in the hope that they would help
the Egyptians upward, merely serve to provoke
and permit disorder, then it 13 for you to alter
the forms. If you stay in Egypt it is your first
duty to keep order, and, above all things else,
to punish murder and bring justice to all who
directly or indirectly incite others to commit mur
der or condone crime when it is committed.
When a people treats assassination as the cor
nerstone of self-government it forfeits the right
to be considered worthy of self-government. You
are in Egypt for several purposes, and among
them one of the greatest is for the benefit of the
Egyptian people. You saved them from ruin, and
at the present moment, if they are not governed
from outside, they will again sink into a welter
of chaos. Some nation must govern Egypt. I
hope and believe you will decide that it is your
duty to continue to be that nation.
In this connection it may be well to add a
little statement of what England has had to com
bat, and what she has accomplished in that
country. The following is condensed from a
statement made by Col. Henry C. Prout who was
the engineer who built the railroad from the
Red Sea to the Nile. He was originally a New
Yorker, but remained many years in Egypt. Wo
condense his statement.
Before the English occupation the Khedive
guthered around him about forty engineers, all
Americans. He selected Americans because they
had no European entanglements. Col. Prout is
enthusiastic over the work accomplished there.
He thinks the awakening of Egypt is one of the
romances of history. The government was feeble
in Egypt, while anarchy ruled from Wada Haifa
to the Nile. In the Soudan in seventeen years a H
population of over 7,000,000 was, through war H
famine and pestilence, reduced to less than 3,- H
000,000. The whole region was bankrupt and the
entire social structure was threatened. England H
has brought peace and order. No other nation
present or past could have done what she has
done. We copy directly from hi report, the fol- l
lowing:
"Life has been safeguarded to the furtherest H
boundaries of the Soudan and the Upper Nile H
provinces. Famine no longer visits the Nile Val- H
ley. Great areas have been redeemed from the H
desert by irrigation. Railroads have been built, H
canals dug, and the finances placed upon a sound H
"Nor has this work been carried out through H
merely selfish motives. The people of all na- H
tions have been benefited by the Improvement of H
the trade routes, not England alone. As a mat- H
ter of fact, the English are in the minority in H
Egypt as compared with the several other Euro- H
pean nations. H
"As recently as the year 1876 the old order H
still prevailed. Egypt suffered from the ignor- H
ance, dishonesty, waste, and extravagance com- H
mon to the native governments of the east. The H
entire country had been brought to the verge of H
ruin. Undue privileges had been acquired by H
the influential c'ass to the detriment and actual H
suffering of the general masses. One of the H
financial Ministers boasted, for instance, that he H
had extracted from the Egyption people some H
$15,000,000 in a single year. Meanwhile the gen- H
eral condition of the population was deplorable. H
Liberty did not exist, and there was no justice. H
No man could choose the career of his own son H
or enjoy that which he himself earned. H
"A crisis had arrived. In 1803, when Said M
Pasha died, the public debt of Egypt was a little H
more than $15,000,000. By 187G the funded debt H
of Egypt was nearly $350,000,000 and the floating fl
debt $125,000,000 or more. All of this vast sum fl
except some $80,000,000 which had been spent H
on the Suez Canal may be said to have been H
squandered. The crash came in 1876 when the H
Khedive suspended payment and Europe was M
obliged to step in to protect its enormous in- M
"It found the general conditions deplorable. H
An enormous proportion of the arable land had
come into the hands of the Khedive and was cul-
tivated by forced labor. Taxes were burdensome
in the extreme, and were collected with merci- H
less thoroughness, and what was even worse, H
they were collected at arbitrary intervals. Every- H
thing was sacrificed in the attempt to pay the in- M
terest on the great national debt now approach- M
ing $500,000,000. The pay of the Government H
employes and the soldiers were months In ar- tM
rears. The Government's accounts were in hope- M
less confusion.'' jH
Real courts of justice were established; the H
personal Government of the Khedive was changed H
to that of an executive council; the taxes were re- H
adjusted, the methods of collecting taxes H
changed; European methods of finances Intro- , H
duced, the salaries of officials paid. The Khedive H
rebelled against this and denounced "Ills foreign H
adviser. jH
This Euro e would not have and the Khedive H
was forced to abdicate. Then chaos came again H
and armed intervention by England became a H
necessity. England did not want Egypt, .but ',1