f the West. It is
natural and healthy that a desire to share in the government of their
country should grow up among these classes: it is in some degree a
proof that the influence of the regime under which they live has been
stimulating. But it is also obvious that if these classes were at once
to reassume, under parliamentary forms, the dominance which they
wielded so disastrously until thirty years ago, the result must be
unhappy. They are being, under British guidance, gradually introduced
to a share in public affairs. But the establishment of a system of full
self-government and national independence in Egypt, if it is to be
successful, must wait until not only these classes, but also the
classes beneath them, have been habituated to the sense of self-respect
and of civic obligation by a longer acquaintance with the working of
the Reign of Law.

Since the Great War broke out, the British position in Egypt has been
regularised by the proclamation of a formal British protectorate.
Perhaps the happiest fate which can befall the country is that it
should make that gradual progress in political freedom, which is alone
lasting, under the guidance of the power which has already given it
prosperity, the ascendancy of an impartial law, freedom from arbitrary
authority, freedom of speech and thought, and emancipation from the
thraldom of foreign financial interests; and in the end it may possibly
be the destiny of this ancient land, after so many vicissitudes, to
take its place as one among a partnership of free nations in a
world-encircling British Commonwealth of self-governing peoples.

The most vexed, difficult, and critical problems in the history of the
British Empire since 1878--perhaps the most difficult in the whole
course of its history--have been those connected with the South African
colonies. In 1878 there were four distinct European provinces in South
Africa, besides protected native areas, like Basutoland. All four had
sprung from the original Anglo-Dutch colony of the Cape of Good Hope.
In two of them--Cape Colony and Natal--the two European peoples,
British and Dutch, dwelt side by side, the Dutch being in a majority in
the former, the British in the latter; but in both the difficulty of
their relationship was complicated by the presence of large coloured
populations, which included not only the native African peoples,
Hottentots, Kaffirs, Zulus, and so forth, but also a large number of
Asiatics, Malays who