the text of the treaty itself, I would impress upon your Excellency that His Majesty's Government cannot contemplate further discussion.

(2.) Your Excellency agreed with me that the settlement embodied in the treaty afforded an equitable adjustment of the differences which have at times unhappily disturbed the good relations which should prevail between Egypt and Great Britain. It was our hope that by this treaty we should secure to Egypt her freedom and independence and her proper position in the comity of nations whilst safeguarding the essential interests and obligations of Great Britain and the British Empire.

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(3.) The freedom of action which Egypt will acquire under the treaty will, however, impose upon her corresponding responsibilities. I must remind your Excellency that at present no small share of these responsibilities falls upon His Majesty's Government under the declaration of February 1922. If Egypt now refuses this settlement, His Majesty's Government will be obliged to insist upon a strict observance of the rights which they reserved to themselves by that declaration.

"(4.) But I am reluctant to believe that Egypt will fail to support your Excellency in your endeavour to establish an alliance between our two countries, and I urge your Excellency to place the treaty before your colleagues without delay, and to proceed, at the earliest possible moment, to its signature. Your Excellency will readily understand that with the reassembly of Parliament I cannot consistently with my obligations avoid giving a full account of our negotiations, which will necessitate. the publication of the whole correspondence in the near future."

20. I trust that you will be able to report to me that Sarwat Pasha has recognised the force of these representations, and has decided to communicate the text of the treaty to his colleagues with a view to securing their approval of its early signature and publication.

I am, &c.

AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN

My Lord,

No. 9.

Sir Austen Chamberlain to Lord Lloyd (Cairo). Foreign Office, March 1, 1928. IN my despatch dated the 5th February last I endeavoured to summarise the course taken by the negotiations respecting the Treaty of Alliance between His Majesty's Government and the Egyptian Prime Minister from the 24th November up to that date. I propose in this communication to bring the narrative up to the present date.

2. On the 7th February your Lordship reported that you had delivered to Sarwat Pasha the personal message from me quoted in paragraph 19 of my despatch referred to in the preceding paragraph.

Your Lordship also made to him the proposal that negotiations should at once be opened with a view to working out the text of notes (to be exchanged upon the ratification of the treaty), providing for the establishment of a British military mission to the Egyptian army. You further discussed with Sarwat Pasha points connected with the Capitulations and the prohibition of flights by aircraft over the Suez Canal zone. In conclusion, your Lordship expressed your own and my earnest hope that Sarwat Pasha would appreciate the moderation and generosity of the attitude adopted by His Majesty's Government in their effort to meet him on the various points raised, and would now submit the whole correspondence to his Cabinet and endeavour to secure the treaty's signature. In reply, his Excellency remarked that he would be failing in his duty to me if he did not warn me frankly that the last word of His Majesty's Government would not satisfy Egyptian public opinion, and that he could, in consequence, see no prospect of the treaty's acceptance either by his colleagues or Parliament. The discussions in London showed that the whole difficulty lay in the maintenance of the British army on Egyptian soil. Egypt could only be convinced of the necessity for this if it could be shown that the advantages of the treaty were such as to outweigh this disadvantage. How, he asked, could he point to Egypt's complete liberty in her internal administration when the treaty laid obligations on her in the matter of the Egyptian army and the police, as well as of the Judicial and Financial Advisers? Your Lordship properly expressed your surprise at such an attitude, having regard to the fact that his Excellency had agreed to and, indeed, expressed satisfaction with, the text of the treaty while in London. Upon this, his Excellency withdrew his remarks as regards the advisers, but he maintained his attitude in the matter of the police and of the British officers in the Egyptian army.

3. In so far as the former were concerned (Annex II (c) of the treaty) he said that he had made a mistake in London in not foreseeing the situation which would result from the rejection by the Powers of Egypt's proposals for capitulatory reform. His colleagues, however, would not consider themselves bound by this mistake of his. He argued that the proposal to submit the question of the police to the League of Nations was not appropriate in a treaty which professed to settle all the points outstanding between Great Britain and Egypt. His Excellency was pleased to add that the League meant nothing to him or to Egypt.

4. As regards the military mission, Sarwat Pasha said that he was quite prepared to make proposals for its establishment, but that he would never persuade his colleagues to sign the treaty before the matter was settled. They would object that, otherwise, nothing would prevent His Majesty's Government from insisting later upon unacceptable conditions in respect of the mission. His Excellency again said that in London I had accepted his contention that Annex I (u) of the treaty referred only to the officers mentioned in the correspondence of last summer, and that, under that correspondence, the officers in question had no executive functions. As I had already pointed out to your Lordship, Sarwat Pasha is

under a complete misapprehension as to my attitude in this connexion, and I subsequently requested your Lordship to impress upon him that his recollection must be at fault on this point. I asked you to remind his Excellency that he had definitely declined to accept any mention in the treaty of the notes exchanged last summer, while I, for my part, had made it abundantly plain that I must maintain the present position. At the same time, I authorised your Lordship to make it clear that His Majesty's Government did not contemplate demanding unacceptable conditions in the shape of an extension in the existing numbers or functions of British officers, and that any apprehensions he might feel on that score were therefore unfounded.

5. Finally, his Excellency protested his anxiety to get the treaty through, and his willingness to take it to his Cabinet as it stood, if I insisted upon this course. But this, he said, would mean failure, and although he recognised that His Majesty's Government had now said their last word, he was bound to explain the position to me exactly. He was about to undertake a journey to Upper Egypt with the King, but in the meanwhile he would carefully consider all the various documents and proposals, and he would furnish your Lordship with a written statement for communication to me after his return to Cairo on the 15th February.

6. On the 8th February Sarwat Pasha unexpectedly asked your Lordship for an immediate interview, and stated that he had decided to lay the treaty before Mustafa Pasha Nahas, the president of the Wafd, and his Cabinet that day. His Excellency then left for Upper Egypt. It subsequently transpired, however, that Sarwat Pasha had not, in fact, communicated the text of the treaty to his colleagues before his departure, but to Nahas Pasha only.

7. On the 18th February Sarwat Pasha handed to your Lordship the text of the following message to me :

"Excellency,

"Lord Lloyd was good enough to communicate to me some time ago a first message addressed to me by your Excellency. I did not immediately answer it, as I considered that the resumption of conversations with Lord Lloyd on the points I had raised in earlier interviews, coupled with efforts to find a basis of understanding, in some measure constituted a reply. Although I was not in agreement with your Excellency as to the scope of Article 14 of the draft treaty as interpreted in the message referred to, and although I felt that it essentially implied difficulties unforeseen at the time of the elaboration of the treaty, and not those which the treaty aimed at settling, that is to say, difficulties known and foreseen before its elaboration, I thought it was unnecessary to continue an academic discussion in view of the friendly declaration with which this message finished and in which you were good enough fully to acknowledge that it was natural for me to endeavour to put myself in a position to explain to my colleagues the extent and meaning of the treaty and of the subsidiary documents.

Quite recently Lord Lloyd communicated to me a second message, which I felt bound to answer. I must at once inform

you of the profound impression made on me by these two messages, not only by their cordial tone, but by the sincere desire to reach an understanding between the two countries which they clearly showed.

"May I, however, be allowed to point out that the requests for interpretations which I had communicated to Lord Lloyd were not in any way intended to introduce new proposals or to reopen a discussion which we both considered to be at an end. Nor was there any intention or pretension to read into the text what it does not imply. They are, in fact, only due to, and amply justified by, the circumstances in which the text of the treaty was prepared.

"You will remember, indeed, that after long discussions with Mr. Selby and Mr. Murray, as well as with your Excellency, certain texts, evolved with the object of fixing the formulæ by which more or less opposing views might be reconciled, particularly those texts which afterwards provoked these requests for interpretations, were only settled on the eve of my departure. Now, it often happens that when words or phrases which are too vague or general are employed in a text (as is the case in the questions in which I have asked for interpretations) the resulting text would be ambiguous and might consequently give rise to conflicting interpretations. Such a possibility should, however, be carefully avoided in a document destined to do away with the possibility of future conflicts. Furthermore, it would be impossible to be too clear or too definite if certain uneasy persons here are to be reassured.

"Therefore, desirous of avoiding difficulties and convinced of the importance of reassuring these uneasy persons and thereby helping on the agreement, I explained to Lord Lloyd upon my return, and after having carefully examined the text, the different points on which an interpretation was necessary, and I have had since then the satisfaction of reading in your first message a most loyal approval of this procedure.

"I had, therefore, every cause for astonishment when, before the questions of the Nile water, of the army or of the police were settled or explained, your Excellency declared that this procedure could not be continued any longer, and invited me to submit the treaty to my colleagues.

In fact, since your first message, the impressions which you were kind enough to promise to outline have formed the subject of several interviews between Lord Lloyd and myself and even, on one occasion, of a written reply on his part which I could not consider satisfactory in certain details and upon which I found it necessary to make some observations, also in writing. In view of this, I considered that in our mutual desire to facilitate the discussion and to limit its scope, it was best to continue it in writing. For this reason I communicated to Lord Lloyd a copy of my request for interpretations which in our verbal discussions had served me as an aide-mémoire: These were, in fact, only

those same requests which your Excellency received in so friendly a manner in your first message.

"I have often regretted that these conversations, owing to the necessity of communicating between London and Cairo, have delayed consultation with my colleagues and with the leaders of the different parties. Not less than your Excellency, and perhaps even more, I have realised the great uneasiness which too long a silence must provoke although rendered inevitable by conditions in which conversations both in London and Cairo have been held, and despite the fact that this continued uneasiness made my task more difficult, I voluntarily assumed responsibility for delay, thinking that I should not have wasted my time if I could obtain the interpretations I had asked for. These interpretations constituted, indeed, in my opinion, so many more arguments in favour of the draft treaty. In combination with its other advantages, they would, when the draft treaty was submitted to my colleagues, allow them to place these definitions in the balance against what might seem to be undesirable. I had, therefore, only one aim, namely, that the task of reaching. an agreement acceptable to both countries, in so far as the draft treaty serves that aim, should be accomplished with the greatest chances of success.

"I could, in laying the whole of the draft treaty before my colleagues, have given them all the interpretations which, according to my conversations, I had held to be implicit in the text, but, knowing that a unilateral interpretation could not, as your Excellency rightly observed in your first message, be binding on the other party, I attempted, in asking for interpretations, not to revive various questions in order to obtain more than our conversations this summer had given, but solely to justify by confirmation on your part the explanations and interpretations which I was authorised to consider as having been implicit in the agreement reached between us without pressure on either side and as having formed the real opinion of those who took part in the discussions in Londen.

"From the above considerations your Excellency will realise that if up to now I have refrained from communicating the draft treaty to my colleagues, it is because I felt that I could not defend it to them without the interpretations which I had asked for and to which Lord Lloyd seemed to hesitate to subscribe. I was, however, after your second message, and not without regret, compelled to communicate the draft to Mustafa-el-Nahas Pasha. I say not without regret because I do not conceal from you that hesitation in confirming the interpretations asked for shows the draft in an unfavourable light.

"In fact, the questions which remain for solution are, in particular, those relating to the army and police. The observations which I have communicated to Lord Lloyd on these two questions are, nevertheless, those which I put forward in my general remarks on the first British draft and during the discus