British Bullying

Through choppy Mediterranean seas dashed the British battleships Warspite and Valiant, last week, steaming full speed ahead from the Empire naval base at Malta toward the Egyptian ports of Alexandria and Port Said. Beside the ponderous battleships, paced three swift cruisers, keen Empire dogs of war. Smoke belched. Spume flew. Meanwhile a good old fashioned ultimatum was being cabled by the potent Government of His Britannic Majesty to the puny Egyptian Cabinet of puppet King Fuad.

The Egyptian Parliament, greatly daring, had brought the ultimatum upon itself by approving the so-called Public Assemblies Bill. Under that innocuous title is cloaked a measure which would severely curtail the police power to maintain order during public meetings, which, in Egypt, turn very easily into anti-British race riots. Therefore the London ultimatum to Cairo, last week, informed Egyptian Prime Minister Nahass Pasha that he must "immediately . . . prevent the Public Assemblies Bill from becoming law," or else expect "His Britannic Majesty's Government to consider themselves free to take such action as the situation may seem to them to require."

The "action" thus cryptically threatened was understood to be the blockading by battleships Warspite and Valiant of the customs offices at Alexandria and Port Said, from which the Egyptian Government derives a major portion of its revenue. Faced with such a threat-to-pocket, Prime Minister Nahass Pasha yielded inevitably, but sought to save the face of Egypt by promising merely that action upon the Public Assemblies Bill would be "postponed." To this equivocal capitulation His Britannic Majesty's Government sternly replied that they "would again be obliged to intervene ... if ... the Public Assemblies Bill were to be revived."

Paradoxically the drafter of Britain's ultimatum and threat to intervene was Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain who recently received a Nobel Peace Award (TIME, Dec. 20, 1926). In the House of Commons, last week, Sir Austen bared his imperfect teeth in a wolfish smile when Opposition back benchers shouted that he was "Bullying Egypt!" With the crisis safely passed, however, he beamingly announced that Empire sea hounds Warspite and Valiant had been ordered back to their kennel at Malta.