success, the resident Greeks supported us from first to last. Cromer had seen land assessment revised, land survey completed, land tax lowered, a land bank created, and the interior and education subjected to advisers since 1896. His long postponement of educational reform has often been criticized; and even so intelligent an Egyptian patriot as Sheikh Mohammed Abdu accused him of keeping the people ignorant in the interest of British imperialism. His own explanation was that he waited till money was plentiful before embarking on experiments in pedagogy, none of the systems proposed at an earlier stage being suitable to Egyptian conditions or promising finality. He used to cite results of our education system in India as instances of the eddies which too rapid a current can produce in the stream of progress; and he was particularly averse from the creation of an urban intelligentsia. In the sphere of primary education progress was retarded by the lack of qualified teachers, and by religious tradition and prejudice; and it was not before Cromer's last years in Egypt that much advance could be attempted. Even then but little reduction resulted in the obstinate illiteracy of the fellahin.
Cromer's formal relations with Abbas, whose attitude was improved by a visit to London, remained friendly, and a step in the peerage in 1899 assured him that his word was still law in Downing Street. In 1901 he was created an earl, and he gratified his friends by marrying Lady Katherine Thynne, second daughter of the fourth Marquess of Bath. By his first wife he had had two sons; now a third was born. A little volume of his Paraphrases from the Greek Anthology had been issued privately before his second marriage; an enlarged edition, published later, was received with favour as the diversion of a man of affairs. In Cairo he had attained to a sort of Pharaonic apotheosis, becoming ‘The Lord’ simply; and sly profanity rang changes on this style. But one thing was already troubling his peace—the ever-growing clamour of nationalists in a hurry. The old whig was not surprised; but he grew more and more apprehensive, lest those at home whom he called sentimental radicals should listen and try to hustle his administrative jog-trot. His health, hitherto robust, began to deteriorate in 1905, indisposing him to listen to a suggestion that he should take the Foreign Office in the Campbell-Bannerman ministry formed late in that year. In 1906 an unexpected ebullition of Egyptian sympathy with a second attempt by Abdul Hamid to revise the Sinaitic boundary added to his uneasiness, though he minimized its import; and atop of it came a wave of native anger at certain death-sentences passed upon natives of the Delta village of Denshawai, who had been convicted of attacking a shooting party of British officers. These sentences he himself (he was in England at the time) judged too severe. He landed from leave in the autumn to find Egyptian society turned topsy-turvy by bubble-speculation and buzzing with malevolent criticism. Ill with chronic indigestion and feeling his age, he held on a little longer. King Edward wrote with his own hand to dissuade the old proconsul from resignation; but Cromer felt too much enfeebled to face the political experiment of speeding up autonomy, which he suspected to be imminent. He delivered an apologia and a counsel of perfection in the Cairo opera house in May 1907, and then went down the side of the ship which he had rescued, refitted, and piloted for nearly a quarter of a century.
Parliament acknowledged handsomely his great use of great talents. Universities offered degrees and societies their presidential chairs. But it was from a private study, out of touch with Whitehall, that he watched his first successor, Sir (John) Eldon Gorst [q. v.], sail the new course he had foreseen would be set, and his second, Lord Kitchener, abruptly put up the helm and steer for such direct control, as he himself had often threatened but never practised. As health returned he began to attend the House of Lords, where he made a maiden speech in February 1908, and took the lead of the free traders. Subsequently he spoke fairly often, and was listened to with respect; but he had no natural gift of oratory, and nervousness in public speaking never left him. In that same year appeared the account of his stewardship (Modern Egypt, 2 vols.) which his first wife had encouraged him to write. The style of the book has the unhurried lucidity of diplomatic dispatches. The British public read it avidly, but Egyptians looked askance at a mirror held up to their nature.
Lord Cromer's old love of the Greek and Roman classics deepened and the range of his reading broadened with his increased leisure. He searched the past assiduously for modern instances, and from the chair of the Classical Association delivered, in 1910, an address on
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