And the ambitions of British policy 45 Evacuating Sudan is not leaving it as a free-for-all If politicians had said: To the small or weak nation, we own your land by force, not by any other means, the weak would have remained silent until they regained their strength and used it for their king and their right. But modern civilization, in its new development, has not reached the point of compelling governments to abandon force for right, and to adopt it as a slogan in speech and a constitution in action. So they clung to the old, i.e., force, and began to dress it in the guise of the new, i.e., the guise of right and law, in words only. And in the affairs of the world, there is no issue more apparent and clearer than the issue of Sudan and Egypt. For England, which entered Egypt in the name of the powers, and was preceded in its entry by the proclamations of the Sultan of Turkey, considering the Arabs as rebels, and the efforts of Khedive Tawfiq, and the assistance of a large group of Egyptian notables, and the consent of the powers, entered it to consolidate the Khedive's throne, or rather, to keep Khedive Tawfiq on the throne. The first action it took was to order the Khedive to withdraw his troops from Aswan. But the Khedive, the master of Egypt and Sudan, the master of the Nile from its source to beyond its mouth, did not withdraw his troops from that land to leave it as a free-for-all for whoever wished to possess it. Rather, he withdrew them "for military necessity and for freedom reasons." Thus, Sudan remained the property of Egypt in the eyes of the powers and in the eyes of the law, which they say governs all their actions. Before the withdrawal of the Egyptian troops from Sudan was completed, British troops landed in Suakin and the coasts of Somalia, and Italian troops landed in Massawa. Lord Dufferin, in his report in 1883, stated the necessity of withdrawing Egyptian troops from the eastern, western, and southern provinces, but his conscience did not allow him at that time to state the necessity of withdrawing them from the Nile Valley from its source to its mouth, so he said: "Some people are inclined to advise Egypt to withdraw from all of Sudan, but he does not expect it to surrender the palace from which it lives from the Nile.