Appeal Without Standing

Russell Pasha, hard-bitten Briton in charge of Cairo police, kept his men at work last week riding down Egyptian students of both sexes with their horses, beating them back with the flats of their sabres, firing into the air when shouts of "Off with our British yoke!" grew too vociferous.

With eight Egyptians killed by Russell Pasha's forces fortnight ago, a scrimmage last week caused the police to shoot an Egyptian boy in the abdomen and gravely wound four others. Russell Pasha then changed his tactics. Police began firing charges of small buckshot directly into massed Cairo demonstrators. Correspondents, surprised to see how spunkily Egyptian girl students stood up to this kind of treatment, decided to call on 70-year-old Mme Said Zaghlul.

The late Zaghlul Pasha founded the Wafd Party which today wins most Egyptian elections by about 97%. The Wafd does not control Egypt for the reason that the country's Premier and its King are puppets imposed and maintained by the British Government which officially maintains that the country is also "The Free and Independent Kingdom of Egypt." For Zaghlul's widow last week all this was too much. In French she cried: "I am boycotting everything British, even the language. We Egyptian women are throwing our moral force and encouragement-- and we are ready to give also our physical force, though it is not great--behind the men fighting for the liberty of Egypt.

"It is only due to the influence of myself and other Egyptian leaders that these riots against the British did not break out long ago. Britain has suffocated us, made us mere servants. We hoped that she would give us a more liberal constitution but now Sir Samuel Hoare, the British Foreign Secretary, with his Guildhall Speech saying that 'England and Egypt are irrevocably bound together by history and geography,' has revealed her real intentions. There is nothing to do but fight!

"Hitherto there has been little sympathy among Egyptians for Italy," concluded Mme Zaghlul, "but there is no telling what may happen now, with the Egyptian people in their present mood!"

As an oblique answer to such Egyptian talk, Great Britain last week invited some Egyptian princes and Premier Nessim Pasha aboard the British cruisers Berwick and Ajax to watch demonstrations of Might off the harbor of Alexandria by 60 British war boats, 60 British warplanes.

Naval correspondents of London papers called what followed the most impressive war games ever staged in the Eastern Mediterranean. Destroyers raced around the main fleet laying dense smoke screens at superspeed, while the British air armada came thundering down in power dives to drop dummy bombs which flashed and roared as they struck the sea. But to Egyptian royalty and the Premier, mindful that Egypt's greatest cities lie within easy range of British guns, the most breathbating demonstration came when the cruiser Ajax, aboard which they stood, anchored one mile from a 30-ft. target, while five British battleships some ten miles away undertook to split the target with their 15-inch projectiles. After distant booms the huge shells came screaming over as the five ships "bracketed," sending one shell over the target and another short in the classic maneuver to determine the exact range. Then all Hell cut loose and within a few seconds the target, which seemed about the size of a buttercup to naked eyes aboard the Ajax, was neatly split in two. British observers reported the Egyptians as "awe-struck."

Same day in Cairo men of the Wafd overturned automobiles, tramcars, used them as barricades. As a rebuke to puppet Premier Nessim for boarding the Ajax the entire vernacular press suspended publication for one day. Successively the Egyptian judges of the Mixed Tribunals and the Justices of the Egyptian Court of Appeals drew up formal protests against the killing of Egyptians. Prompt British pressure forced Egypt's Minister of Justice to reprimand the protesting judges in such terms that their leader, Ghaleb Bey, left the room in the middle of the proceedings, saying that as a Justice of Egypt's superior court he had been "intolerably insulted."

At Geneva arrived a formal protest from the Egyptian Wafd Party asking the Council of the League of Nations to "deal with the situation arising from the illegal occupation of Egypt by British forces since 1882." So far as correspondents could discover, neither the League Council nor Britain's famed "White Knight of Geneva" Captain Anthony Eden, was disposed to admit that this appeal had any standing whatsoever. It did not come from the Egyptian Government, Geneva statesmen said, merely from the Wafd-- which for almost two decades has represented the overwhelming majority of Egypt's voters.

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