Transcriber's Note:

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including non-standard transcriptions of Arabic and some inconsistent hyphenation. Some changes of spelling and punctuation have been made. They are listed at the end of the text.

Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt

[BOOKS BY WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT]

PROSE

• THE FUTURE OF ISLAM 1882
• IDEAS ABOUT INDIA 1885
• THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES
• • I THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH OCCUPATION OF EGYPT 1907
  • II INDIA UNDER RIPON 1909
  • III GORDON AT KHARTOUM 1911
  • IV THE LAND WAR IN IRELAND 1912
  • V MY DIARIES PART I. [THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA] 1919
  • VI MY DIARIES PART II. [THE COALITION AGAINST GERMANY] 1920

POETRY

• LOVE SONNETS OF PROTEUS 1880
• THE WIND AND THE WHIRLWIND 1883
• IN VINCULIS 1889
• A NEW PILGRIMAGE 1889
• ESTHER AND LOVE LYRICS 1892
• GRISELDA 1893
• SATAN ABSOLVED 1899
• SEVEN GOLDEN ODES OF ARABIA 1903
• POETICAL WORKS. A COMPLETE EDITION 1914

SECRET HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH
OCCUPATION OF EGYPT
Being a Personal Narrative of Events

By
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

NEW YORK ALFRED·A·KNOPF MCMXXII

COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

Published, October, 1922

Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York, N. Y.
Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

[PUBLISHER'S NOTE]

When I first arranged with Mr. Blunt to publish The Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, I suggested that he write for the American Edition a brief foreword bringing the book into even closer relation to the Anglo-Egyptian situation as it stands today. He thought this idea a good one, and agreed to write such a note. But Mr. Blunt was born in 1840, and has for a number of years been in failing health. In June he wrote me that he was so ill as to be quite unable to finish the foreword, which he had actually commenced to write. He felt furthermore that any advantage the edition would gain by having a new preface by him would be more than counterbalanced by any delay in the appearance of the book "at the present extremely critical moment."

He remarked further: "What could I have said more appropriate today as a new preface than the few words which already stand as the short preface I set to the first edition of my Secret History (published in London and which you reprint in this new edition). This and my poem The Wind and the Whirlwind (which you also give as an [Appendix]). Both are absolutely true of the present shameful position of England in Egypt and the calamity so closely threatening her Eastern Empire. What could I say more exactly suited? This is the punishment we are reaping today for our sin of that sad morning on the Nile which saw the first English gun open its thunder of aggression just forty years ago at Alexandria in the name of England's honour. What could I add to my words of grief and shame then uttered and repeated here? Let these stand for my new preface. My day is done. Alas! that I should have lived to see those words come true of England's punishment, more than true."

A. A. K.

[PREFACE OF 1895]

I desire to place on record in a succinct and tangible form the events which have come within my knowledge relating to the origin of the English occupation of Egypt—not necessarily for publication now, but as an available document for the history of our times. At one moment I played in these events a somewhat prominent part, and for nearly twenty years I have been a close and interested spectator of the drama which was being acted at Cairo.

It may well be, also, that the Egyptian question, though now quiescent, will reassert itself unexpectedly in some urgent form hereafter, requiring of Englishmen a new examination of their position there, political and moral; and I wish to have at hand and ready for their enlightenment the whole of the materials I possess. I will give these as clearly as I can, with such documents in the shape of letters and journals as I can bring together in corroboration of my evidence, disguising nothing and telling the whole truth as I know it. It is not always in official documents that the truest facts of history are to be read, and certainly in the case of Egypt, where intrigue of all kinds has been so rife, the sincere student needs help to understand the published parliamentary papers.

Lastly, for the Egyptians, if ever they succeed in re-establishing themselves as an autonomous nation, it will be of value that they should have recorded the evidence of one whom they know to be their sincere friend in regard to matters of diplomatic obscurity which to this day they fail to realize. My relations with Downing Street in 1882 need to be related in detail if Egyptians are ever to appreciate the exact causes which led to the bombardment of Alexandria and the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, while justice to the patriot leader of their "rebellion" requires that I should give a no less detailed account of Arabi's trial, which still presents itself to some Egyptian as to all French minds, in the light of a pre-arranged comedy devised to screen a traitor. It does not do to leave truth to its own power of prevailing over lies, and history is full of calumnies which have remained unrefuted, and of ingratitudes which nations have persisted in towards their worthiest sons.

Sheykh Obeyd, Egypt.

1895

[PREFACE ON PUBLICATION]

Since the first brief preface to my manuscript was written twelve years ago, events have happened which seem to indicate that the moment foreseen in it has at last arrived when to the public advantage and without risk of serious indiscretion as far as individuals are concerned, the whole truth may be given to the world.

Already in 1904 the original manuscript had been thoroughly revised, and in its purely Egyptian part remodelled under circumstances which add greatly to its historic value. My old Egyptian friend, Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, of whom so much mention is made in it, had taken up his country residence at my doors at Sheykh Obeyd, and I found myself in almost daily intercourse with him, a most precious accident of which I did not fail to take full advantage. That great philosopher and patriot—now, alas, lost to us, for he died at Alexandria, 11th July, 1905, the day being the twenty-third anniversary of the bombardment of that city—after many vicissitudes of evil and good fortune had attained in the year 1899 to the supreme position in Egypt of Grand Mufti, and having thus acquired a wider sphere than ever of influence with his fellow countrymen, had it at heart to bequeath to them a true account of the events of his time, events which had become strangely misunderstood by them, and clothed with legends altogether fantastic and unreal.

On this subject he often spoke to me, regretting his lack of leisure to complete the historic work, and when I told him of my own memoir, he urged me very strongly to publish it, if not in English at least with his help in Arabic, and he undertook to go through it with me and see that all that part of it which related to matters within his knowledge was accurately and fully told. We had been personal friends and political allies almost from the date of my first visit to Egypt, and with his garden adjoining mine it was an easy matter for us to work together and compare our recollections of the men and things we had known. It was in this way that my history of an epoch so memorable to us both took final shape, and I was able (how fortunately!) to complete it and obtain from him his approval and imprimatur before his unlooked-for death closed forever the chief source of knowledge which he undoubtedly was of the political movement which led up to the revolution of 1881, and of the intrigues which marred it in the following year.

The Mufti's death, a severe blow to me as well as to Egypt, postponed indefinitely our plan of publishing in Arabic, nor till the present year has the time seemed politically ripe for the production of my work in English. The events, however, of 1906, and now Lord Cromer's retirement from the Egyptian scene, have so wholly changed the situation that I feel I ought no longer to delay, at least as far as my duty to my own countrymen is concerned. We English are confronted to-day in our dealings with Egypt with very much the same problem we misunderstood and blundered about so disastrously a generation ago, and if those of us who are responsible for public decisions are, in the words of my first preface, to "re-examine their position there, political and moral," honestly or to any profit, it is necessary they should first have set before them the past as it really was and not as it has been presented to them so long by the fallacious documents of their official Blue Books. I should probably not be wrong in asserting that neither Lord Cromer at Cairo nor Sir Edward Grey at home, nor yet Lord Cromer's successor Sir Eldon Gorst, have any accurate knowledge of what occurred in Egypt twenty-five years ago—this notwithstanding Lord Cromer's tardy recognition of the reform movement of 1881 and his eulogium of Sheykh Mohammed Abdu repeated so recently as in his last annual Report. Lord Cromer, it must be remembered, was not at Cairo during any part of the revolutionary period here described, and, until quite recently, has always assumed the "official truth" regarding it to be the only truth.

For this reason I have decided now finally on publication, giving the text of my Memoir as it was completed in January, 1905, the identical text of which my friend signified his approval suppressing only certain brief passages which seem to me still too personal in regard to individuals living, and which could be excised without injury to the volume's complete historic value. I can sincerely say that in all I have written my one great aim has been to disclose the vérité vraie as it is known to me for misguided History's sake.

If there is at all a second reason with me, it must be looked for in a promise publicly made as long ago as in the September number of the "Nineteenth Century Review" of 1882 that I would complete some day my personal Apologia in regard to events then contemporary. At that time and out of consideration for Mr. Gladstone, and for the hope I had that he would yet repair the wrong he had done to liberty in Egypt, I forbore, in the face of much obloquy, to exculpate myself by a full revelation of the hidden circumstances which were my justification. I could not clear myself entirely without telling facts technically confidential, and I decided to be silent.

There is, however, a limit to the duty of reticence owed to public men in public affairs, and I am confident that my abstention of a quarter of a century will excuse me with fair judging minds if I now at last make my conduct quite clear in the only way possible to me, namely, by a complete exposure in detail of the whole drama of financial intrigue and political weakness as it was at the time revealed to me, substantiating it by the contemporary documents still in my possession. If the susceptibilities of some persons in high places are touched by a too candid recital, I can but reply that the necessity of speech has been put on me by their own long lack of candour and generosity. During all these years not one of those who knew the truth has said a confessing word on my behalf. It will be enough if I repeat with Raleigh:

Go, Soul, the Body's guest,
Upon a thankless errand.
Fear not to touch the best,
The truth shall be thy warrant.
Then go, for thou must die,
And give the world the lie.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

Newbuildings Place, Sussex.
April, 1907.

[CONTENTS]

[Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt]

[CHAPTER I]
EGYPT UNDER ISMAÏL

My first visit to Egypt was in the winter of 1875-6, when I spent some pleasant months as a tourist on the lower Nile. Before, however, describing my impressions of this my earliest acquaintance made with the Egyptian people, it may be as well, that, for their benefit and the benefit of foreign readers generally, I should say a few words in explanation of what my previous life had been as far as it had had any relation to public affairs. It will show them my exact position in my own country, and help them to understand how it came about that, beginning as a mere onlooker at what was passing in their country, I gradually became interested in it politically and ended by taking an active part in the revolution which six years later developed itself among them. I was already thirty-five years of age at the date of this first visit, and had seen much of men and things.

I began life rather early. Belonging to a family of the landed gentry of the south of England with strong Conservative traditions and connected with some of the then leaders of the Tory party, I was placed at the age of eighteen in the Diplomatic Service, in the first instance as attaché to the British Legation at Athens where King Otho was still on the throne of Greece, and afterwards, during a space of twelve years, as member of other legations and embassies to the various Courts of Europe, in all of which I learned a little of my profession, amused myself, and made friends. I was thus, between 1859 and 1869, for some weeks at Constantinople in the reign of Sultan Abd-el-Mejid; for a couple of years in the Germany of the Germanic Confederation; for a year in Spain under Queen Isabella; and for another year in Paris at the climax of the Emperor's prestige under Napoleon III; and I was also for a short time in the Republic of Switzerland, in South America, and in Portugal. Everywhere my diplomatic recollections are agreeable ones, but they are without special political interest or importance of any official kind.

Our English diplomacy in those days, the years following the Crimean War, which had disgusted Englishmen with foreign adventures, was very different from what it has since become. It was essentially pacific, unaggressive, and devoid of those subtleties which have since earned it a reputation of astuteness at the cost of its honesty. Official zeal was at a discount in the public service, and nothing was more certain to bring a young diplomatist into discredit at the Foreign Office than an attempt, however laudable, to raise any new question in a form demanding a public answer. We attachés and junior secretaries were very clearly given to understand this, and that it was not our business to meddle with the politics of the Courts to which we were accredited, only to make ourselves agreeable socially, and amuse ourselves, decorously if possible, but at any rate in the reverse of any serious sense. It is no exaggeration when I affirm it that in the whole twelve years of my diplomatic life I was asked to discharge no duty of the smallest professional importance. This discouraging régime gave me, while I was in the service, a thorough distaste for politics, nor was it till long after, and under very different conditions and under circumstances wholly accidental, that I at last turned my attention seriously to them. My pursuits as an attaché were those of pleasure, social intercourse, and literature. I wrote poems, not despatches, and though I assisted diplomatically at some of the serious dramas of the day in Europe, it was in the spirit of a spectator rather than of an actor, and of one hardly admitted at all behind the scenes. On my marriage in 1869, which was soon followed by the death of my elder brother which left me heir to the family estates in Sussex, I retired without regret from the public service to attend to matters of private concern which had always interested me more.

Nevertheless my early connection with the Foreign Office, though it was never to be officially renewed, was maintained on a friendly footing as of one honourably retired from the service, and this and my experience of Courts and capitals abroad, proved later of no little value to me when I once more found myself thrown by accident into the stream of international affairs. It gave me the advantage of a professional knowledge of the machinery of foreign politics and, what was still more important, a personal acquaintance with many of those who were working that machinery. Not a few of these had been my intimate friends. Thus at the very outset of my life I had found myself in official fellowship with Lord Currie, who for so many years directed the permanent policy of the Foreign Office, with Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, Sir Frank Lascelles, Sir Edward Malet, Lord Dufferin, Lord Vivian, and Sir Rivers Wilson, all closely connected afterwards with the making of Egyptian history, with Lord Lytton who was to be Viceroy of India in the years immediately preceding the crisis of 1881, and amongst foreign diplomatists with M. de Nélidoff, Russian Ambassador at Constantinople, Baron Haymerly, who died Prime Minister of the Austrian Empire, and M. de Staal, for twenty years Russian Ambassador in London. With all these I was on terms of personal intimacy long before I paid my first visit to Egypt, and it is with a full knowledge of their individual characters that I am able to speak of them and judge them. Having been myself, as it were, of the priesthood, I could not well be deceived by the common insincerities which are the stock in trade of diplomacy, or mistake for public policy action which was often only personal. It is far too readily believed by those who are without individual experience of diplomacy that the great events of the world's history are the result of elaborate political design and not as they are really in most instances, dependent upon unforeseen accidents and the personal strength or weakness, sometimes the personal whim, of the agents employed.

For the first few years of my retirement from the service I occupied myself entirely with my domestic affairs, and, as I have said, it was only by accident that my mind was gradually turned to politics. In 1873, finding myself in indifferent health, and to escape a late spring in England, I made with my wife our first common journey in Eastern lands. We went by Belgrade and the Danube to Constantinople, where we found Sir Henry Elliott at the Embassy and renewed acquaintance with other friends connected with it, among them with Dr. Dickson, of whom I shall have afterwards to speak in connection with the tragical death of Sultan Abd-el-Aziz, and who attended me with great kindness during a sharp attack of pneumonia I had there and for whom I contracted a sincere regard. The Ottoman Empire was then enjoying a period of comparative tranquillity before the storm of war which was so soon to burst over it, and I troubled myself little with its internal broils, but my sympathies, such as they were at that time, were, in common with those of most Englishmen of the day, with the Turks rather than the Christians of the Empire. On my recovery from my illness, I bought half a dozen pack horses at the At-maidan, the horse market at Stamboul, and with them we crossed over to Scutari and spent six pleasant summer weeks wandering in the hills and through the poppy fields of Asia Minor, away from beaten tracks and seeing as much of the Turkish peasant life as our entire ignorance of their language allowed. We were impressed, as all travellers have been, with the honest goodness of these people and the badness of their Government. We judged of the latter by what we saw of the ways of the Zaptiehs, our semi-military escort, whose manner with them was that of soldiers in an invaded country. Yet it was clear that with much fiscal oppression a large personal liberty existed in rural Turkey for the poor, such as contrasted not unfavourably with our own police and magistrate-ridden England. The truth is that everywhere in the East the administrative net is one of wide meshes, with rents innumerable through which all but the largest fish have good chance of escaping. In ordinary times there is no persecution of the quite indigent. I remember telling some peasants, who had complained to me through my Armenian dragoman of hardship in their lives at Government hands, that there were countries in still worse plight than their own, where if a poor man so much as lay down by the roadside at night and got together a few sticks to cook a meal he ran the risk of being brought next day before the Cadi and cast into prison; and I remember that my listeners refused to believe my tale or that such great tyranny existed anywhere in the world. My deduction from this incident is the earliest political reflection I can remember making in regard to Eastern things.

The following winter—that is to say, the early months of 1874—we spent in Algeria. Here we assisted at another spectacle which gave food for reflection: that of an Eastern people in violent subjection to a Western. The war in which France had just been engaged with Germany had been followed in Algeria by an Arab rising, which had spread to the very outskirts of Algiers, and the Mohammedan natives were now experiencing the extreme rigours of Christian repression. This was worst in the settled districts, the colony proper, where the civil administration was taking advantage of the rebellion to confiscate native property and in every way to favour the European colonists at the native expense. With all my love for the French (and I had been at Paris during the war, and had been enthusiastic for its defence at the time of the siege) I found my sympathies in Algeria going out wholly to the Arabs. In the Sahara, beyond the Atlas, where military rule prevailed, things were somewhat better, for the French officers for the most part appreciated the nobler qualities of the Arabs and despised the mixed rascaldom of Europe—Spanish, Italian, and Maltese as well as their own countrymen—which made up the "Colonie." The great tribes of the Sahara were still at that time materially well off, and retained not a little of their ancient pride of independence which the military commandants could not but respect. We caught glimpses of these nomads in the Jebel Amour and of their vigorous way of life, and what we saw delighted us. We listened to their chauntings in praise of their lost hero Abd-el-Kader, and though we misunderstood them on many points owing to our ignorance of their language, we admired and pitied them. The contrast between their noble pastoral life on the one hand, with their camel herds and horses, a life of high tradition filled with the memory of heroic deeds, and on the other hand the ignoble squalor of the Frank settlers, with their wineshops and their swine, was one which could not escape us, or fail to rouse in us an angry sense of the incongruity which has made of these last the lords of the land and of those their servants. It was a new political lesson which I took to heart, though still regarding it as in no sense my personal affair.

Such had been the preliminary training of my life, and such its main circumstances when, as I have said, in the winter of 1875-6 I first visited Egypt. The only other matter which, perhaps, deserves here a word of explanation to non-English readers, and it is one that in Europe will receive its full appreciation, is the fact that my wife, Lady Anne Blunt, who accompanied me on all these travels, was the grandaughter of our great national poet, Lord Byron, and so was the inheritor, in some sort, of sympathies in the cause of freedom in the East, which were not without their effect upon our subsequent action. It seemed to us, in presence of the events of 1881-2, that to champion the cause of Arabian liberty would be as worthy an endeavour as had been that for which Byron had died in 1827. As yet, however, in 1875, neither of us had any thought in visiting Egypt more serious than that of another pleasant travelling adventure in Eastern lands. We had on leaving England the plan of entering Egypt from the south, by way of Suakim, Kassala, and the Blue Nile, and so of working our way northwards to Cairo in the spring, but this, owing to the issue, just then so unfortunate to Egypt, of the Abyssinian campaign, was never realized, and the only part of our program which we carried out was that instead of landing at Alexandria, as was then the universal custom, we went on by the Canal to Suez and there first set foot upon Egyptian soil.

My first impression of all of Egypt is of our passage on the last day of the year 1875 through Lake Menzaleh, at that time the unpersecuted home of innumerable birds—a truly wonderful spectacle of prodigal natural life—to a point on the Canal north of Ismaïlia. What a sight it was! Lake Menzaleh was still an almost virgin region, and the flocks of flamingos, ducks, pelicans, and ibises which covered it, passed all belief in their prodigious magnitude. The waters, too, of the lakes and of the Canal itself were alive with fish so large and in such great quantities that not a few were run down by our ship's bows in passing, while everywhere they were being preyed on by fish hawks and cormorants, which sat watching on the posts and buoys. I imagine that the letting in of the sea for the first time on land never before covered with water provided the fish with feeding ground of exceptional richness, an advantage which has since been lost. But certain it is that both fish and birds have dwindled sadly since, and it seems unlikely that the splendid spectacle we saw that winter will be again enjoyed there by any traveller's eyes.

We landed at Suez in the first days of the year 1876, and the news of the great disaster which had overtaken the Egyptian army in Abyssinia was the first that greeted us. The details of it were not generally known, but it appeared that seven ortas, or divisions, of the Khedivial troops had perished, while a tale was in circulation of the Khedive's son, Prince Hassan, having been captured and mutilated by the enemy, an exaggeration which was afterwards disproved, for the prince, a mere boy at the time, had been carried away from the battlefield of Kora early in the day, at the very beginning of the rout, as had Ratib Pasha himself, the Egyptian general in command, who was in charge of him. Loringe Pasha, however, the American, had really lost his life with many thousands of the rank and file, and the misfortune put a final limit to the Khedive Ismaïl's ambition of universal empire on the Nile. In our small way it affected us, as making our thought of a journey to Kassala impossible, and deciding us on a less adventurous one immediately in Lower Egypt.

We were anxious, nevertheless, to see Egypt in a less conventional way than that of ordinary tourists, and, having our camping equipment with us for the longer journey, we hired camels at Suez and went by the old caravan route to Cairo. It is not necessary that I should say much of our journey across the desert. The four days spent in it alone with our Bedouin camel-men gave us our first practical lessons in Arabic—in Algeria we had been dependent wholly on a dragoman—and they laid the basis, too, of those relations with the desert tribes of Arabia which were afterwards to become so pleasant to us and so intimate. On the fifth morning we entered Cairo, greeted on our arrival at Abbassiyeh by the whistling of bullets fired by the Khedivial troops at practice, for we had unwittingly encamped overnight just behind their targets and the aim of the recruits was very uncertain, but no harm was suffered. We little thought at the time that we should ever be interested in the doings of these soldiers as a fighting army, and still less that our sympathies would one day be with them in a war against our own countrymen. I was as yet, though not perhaps even then enthusiastically so, a believer in the common English creed that England had a providential mission in the East, and that our wars were only waged there for honest and beneficent reasons. Nothing was further from my mind than that we English ever could be guilty, as a nation, of a great betrayal of justice in arms for our mere selfish interests.

Neither need I say anything in detail about Cairo, through which we passed that day without stopping longer than to ask for our letters at the Consulate. Our object was to see the country districts and not to waste time on a city already in part European, and we thought to find camping ground immediately beyond the Nile. So we rode on. We did not understand the entreaties of our camel-men that we should alight and let them and their camels go back, or realize that we were doing them an injustice by forcing them to break the tribal rule which forbade them as Bedouins of the eastern desert to cross over to the west. In spite of their expostulations we held on our way by the Kasr-el-Nil bridge and the road to Ghizeh. We had caught sight of the Pyramids and pushed on eagerly in their direction, and were only stopped by the failing light which overtook us at sunset close to the little fellah village of Tolbiya, the last but one before the Pyramids are reached. It was there that we made our halt and alighted for the first time on the black soil of the Nile, as yet hardly dry from the autumn inundation.

The good people of Tolbiya, in their hearty fellah fashion, received us with all possible hospitality. Though living on the tourist road to the Pyramids and accustomed to treat Frank travellers in some sort as their prey, the fact of our alighting at their village for a night's lodging gave us a character of guests they at once recognized. Of all the Europeans who for many years had passed their way, not one had made a pause at their doors. Thus our relations with them were from the outset friendly, and the accident served us as an introduction in the sequel to other villagers when, after a few days spent among these, we went once more on our way. We had no choice at the time but to stay where we were, for in the morning our Bedouins refused to go a mile farther with us, and, having received their hire, departed with their camels. Other camels then had to be found. So it happened that my first week in Egypt was occupied in going a round of the neighbouring village markets in search of the needed beasts, and making purchases of pack saddles and water, skins and all kinds of travelling gear for our further journey.

The fellahin at that time were in terrible straits of poverty. It was the first of the three last terrible years of the Khedive Ismaïl's reign; Ismaïl Sadyk, the notorious Mufettish, was in power; the European bondholders were clamouring for their "coupons," and famine was at the doors of the fellahin. It was rare in those days to see a man in the fields with a turban on his head, or with more than a shirt to his back. Even in the neighbourhood of Cairo, and still more in the Fayûm to which we took our way as soon as the camels were procured, I can testify that this was the case. The country Sheykhs themselves had few of them a cloak to wear. Wherever we went it was the same. The provincial towns on market days were full of women selling their clothes and their silver ornaments to the Greek usurers, because the tax collectors were in their villages whip in hand. We bought their poor trinkets and listened to their stories, and joined them in their maledictions on a government which was laying them bare. We did not as yet understand, any more than did the peasants themselves, the financial pressure from Europe which was the true cause of these extreme exactions; and we laid the blame, as they did, on Ismaïl Pasha and the Mufettish, Ismaïl Sadyk, little suspecting our English share of the blame.

The villagers were outspoken enough. Englishmen in those days were popular everywhere in Mohammedan lands, being looked upon as free from the political designs of the other Frank nations, and individually as honester than these in their commercial dealings. In Egypt especially they stood in amiable contrast with the needy adventures from the Mediterranean sea-board—the Italian, Greek, and Maltese money-lenders—who were sucking the life blood of the Moslem peasantry. Already there were rumours in the air which had reached the village of a possible European intervention, and the idea of it, if it was to be English, was not unpopular. The truth is that the existing state of things was wholly unendurable, and any change was looked to with joy by the starving people as a possible relief. England to the fellahin in their actual condition of beggary, robbed and beaten and perishing of hunger, appeared in the light of a bountiful and friendly providence very rich and quite disinterested, a redresser of wrongs and friend of the oppressed, just such, in fact, as individual English tourists then often were, who went about with open hands and expressions of sympathy. They did not suspect the immense commercial selfishness which had led us, collectively as a nation, to so many aggressions on the weak races of the world.

In the year 1876 I too, as I have said, was a believer in England, and I shared the common idea of the beneficence of her rule in the East, and I had no other thought for the Egyptians than that they should share with India, which I had not yet seen, the privilege of our protection. "The Egyptians," I wrote in my journal of the time, "are a good, honest people as any in the world—all, that is, who do not sit in the high places. Of these I know nothing. But the peasants, the fellahin, have every virtue which should make a happy, well-to-do-society. They are cheerful, industrious, obedient to law, and pre-eminently sober, not only in the matter of drink, but of the other indulgences to which human nature is prone. They are neither gamblers nor brawlers, nor licentious livers; they love their homes, their wives, their children. They are good sons and fathers, kind to dumb animals, old men, beggars, and idiots. They are absolutely without prejudice of race, and perhaps even of religion. Their chief fault is a love of money, but that is one political economists will readily pardon.... It would be difficult to find anywhere a population better fitted to attain the economical end of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In politics they have no aspirations except to live and let live, to be allowed to work and keep the produce of their labour, to buy and sell without interference and to escape taxation. They have been ill-treated for ages without losing thereby their goodness of heart; they have few of the picturesque virtues; they are neither patriotic nor fanatical nor romantically generous. But they are free from the picturesque vices. Each man works for himself—at most for his family. The idea of self-sacrifice for the public good they do not understand, but they are innocent of plots to enslave their fellows.... In spite of the monstrous oppression of which they are the victims, we have heard no word of revolt, this not from any superstitious regard for their rulers, for they are without political prejudice, but because revolt is no more in their nature than it is in a flock of sheep. They would hail the Queen of England, or the Pope, or the King of Ashantee with equal eagerness if these came with the gift for them of a penny less taxation in the pound."

Such were my first thoughts about Egypt in the early days of 1876, not altogether inaccurate ones, though I was far from suspecting the growth already beginning of political ideas in the towns. Neither did I understand the full influence of European finance in the hardships from which the peasantry were suffering. Nevertheless, on our return to Cairo in March I saw something of the reverse of the medal. Mr. Cave's financial mission had arrived during our tour, and was established in one of the palaces on the Shubra Road, and from its members—one of whom was an old acquaintance, Victor Buckley of the Foreign Office, and from Colonel Staunton, our Consul-General—I learned something of the condition of financial affairs; while a little later Sir Rivers Wilson, also my friend, who was to play later so prominent a part in Egyptian affairs, appeared at Cairo and joined the other members of the financial inquiry. What their report was of the condition of affairs I need not here relate in detail, but it will help to an understanding of the matter if I give a very short account of it and how their mission came to be appointed, the first of its kind in Egypt.[1]

The Khedive Ismaïl's reign had begun in the full tide of a period for Egypt of high material prosperity. His predecessor, Saïd, a man of fairly enlightened views, had had the good sense to give all possible encouragement to the fellahin in agricultural matters. He had abandoned the claim of the Viceroy to be sole landlord on the Nile, had recognized proprietary rights in the existing occupiers of land, and had fixed the land tax at the low figure of forty piastres to the feddan. This had resulted in a general enrichment of the population, and the fellahin, emancipated from their old condition of serfdom to the Circassian Pashas, were everywhere accumulating wealth. Egypt at the close of Saïd's reign had become not only the most prosperous province of the Ottoman Empire, but one of the most progressive agriculturally of the Eastern world. The revenue, though small in comparison to what it is now, probably not more than four millions sterling, was easily collected, and the expenses of administration were insignificant, while the public debt amounted to only three millions. It is true that in his later years Saïd had granted a number of concessions to European adventurers on terms which were becoming a heavy burden on the state, but the general wealth of the country was so large that this was not more than its light taxation could bear, and the Viceroy had at his disposal, when all yearly claims had been discharged, probably not less than a couple of millions for his free expenditure. Certainly there never had been an age in Egypt when the mass of the native inhabitants had been so materially prosperous; and to the fellahin especially it had come to be spoken of as, for them, the "age of gold." Ismaïl, when in 1860 he succeeded to the Viceroyalty, was without question the richest of Mohammedan princes and master of the most prosperous of Mohammedan states.

Ismaïl's character, before he became Viceroy, had been that of a wealthy landed proprietor managing his large estates in Upper Egypt according to the most enlightened modern methods. He was praised by nearly all European travellers for the machinery he had introduced and the expenditure he had turned to profit, and it is certain that he possessed a more than usual share of that natural shrewdness and commercial aptitude which distinguishes the family of Mohammed Ali. His succession to the Viceroyalty had been more or less a surprise to him, for until within a few months of Saïd's death he had not been the immediate heir, and his prospects had been only those of an opulent private person. It was perhaps this unexpected stroke of fortune that from the beginning of his reign led him to extravagance. By nature a speculator and inordinately greedy of wealth, he seems to have looked upon his inheritance and the absolute power now suddenly placed in his hands, not as a public trust, but as the means above all things else of aggrandizing his private fortune. At the same time he was as inordinately vain and fond of pleasure, and his head was turned by his high position and the opportunity it gave him of figuring in the world as one of its most splendid princes. He was surrounded at once by flatterers of all kinds, native and European, who promised on the one hand to make him the richest of financiers, and on the other the greatest of Oriental sovereigns. In listening to these his own cleverness and commercial skill betrayed him, and made him only their more ready dupe. Ismaïl, before his accession, had been an astute money-maker according to the ways in which money was then made in Egypt, and he had had, too, a European education of the kind Orientals acquire on the Paris boulevards, superficial as regards all serious matters, but sufficient to convince him of his capacity to deal with the rogues of the Bourse with the weapons of their own roguery. In both directions he was led astray.

His first act of self aggrandizement was simple and successful. The revenue, which rested chiefly on the land tax, was low, and he raised it by progressive enhancements from the 40 piastres where he found it, to 160, where it has ever since stood. The country under his hand was rich and at first could afford the extra burden. Men gave of their superfluity rather than of their necessity, and for some years did so without complaint. This enhancement, however, of the revenue was only part of his rapacious program. His native flatterers reminded him that in the days of his grandfather the whole land had been regarded as the Viceroy's personal property, and that, moreover, Mohammed Ali had claimed and exercised for some years a monopoly of its foreign trade. Ismaïl schemed to revive these rights in his own person, and though he did not dare, in the face of European opinion, to commit any great acts of open confiscation in regard to the land, he gained to a large extent his ends by other means, and so rapidly that in a few years he managed to get into his own hands a fifth of the whole area of the cultivable land of Egypt. His method was by various means of intimidation and administrative pressure to make the possession of such lands as he desired to acquire a burden to their owners, and to render their lives so vexatious that they should be constrained to sell at prices little more than nominal. In this way he had, as I have said, possessed himself of an enormous property in land, and he doubtless thought that this was to prove to him a correspondingly enormous source of personal income. But his very covetousness in the matter proved his ruin. It was found in practice that while under his personal management as a comparatively small owner his estates had been well worked, and had brought him wealth, his new gigantic ownership laid him open to losses in a hundred ways. In vain he laid out enormous sums on machinery. In vain he laid whole villages and districts under contribution to furnish him forced labour. In vain he started factories on his estates and employed managers from Europe at the highest salaries. He was robbed everywhere by his agents, and was unable to gather from his lands even a fraction of the revenue they had brought in taxation when not his own. This was the beginning of his financial difficulties, coinciding as it did with the sudden fall in agricultural prices, and especially of cotton, which soon after set in, and it was the beginning, too, of the ruin of the peasantry, whom, to supply his deficiency, he now loaded with irregular taxation of all kinds. Ismaïl Sadyk, the notorious Mufettish, was his chief agent in this disastrous history.

It was not long, however, before Ismaïl fell into much more dangerous hands, and embarked in much more ruinous adventures than these early ones. To say nothing of the enormous sums which he poured out like water on his own private pleasures, of his follies of palace building, his follies with European women, and his follies of royal entertainment, there were schemes of ambition vast enough to drain the purse of any treasury. It is not known precisely how many millions he expended at Constantinople in procuring himself the Khedivial title, and in getting the order of the viceregal succession altered in favour of his son. But it must have been very many, while still more went in hair-brained schemes of speculation and in liabilities contracted towards European syndicates. Lastly, there was the conquest of the Upper Nile, and the attempted conquest of the kingdom of Abyssinia. To provide for all these immense expenditures loans had to be raised, at first on a small scale with local bankers and Greeks of Alexandria, and presently in more reckless fashion on the European Stock Exchange. Here his worst counsellor and evil genius had been Nubar Pasha, the Armenian financier, who, by a strange inversion of ideas, has come to be regarded by a certain class of Egyptian opinion ignorant of history as an "Egyptian patriot." Nubar was, however, in fact, the one man who, more than any other after Ismaïl himself, was responsible for Egypt's financial ruin.[2] Commissioned by his master to find him money at any cost to meet his extravagant wants, he raised loan after loan for him in Europe on terms which realized for him hardly more than 60 per cent. of the capital sums he inscribed himself for as debtor, while he, Nubar, pocketed as commission several millions sterling. Of the ninety-six millions nominally raised in this way, it has been calculated that only some fifty-four reached Ismaïl's hands.

At the date which I am writing of the whole of this liability had not yet been incurred, but already the interest on the foreign debt amounted to four millions yearly, and to raise sufficient revenue to meet it and to carry on the administration and pay the huge expense of the Abyssinian war, the peasantry were being fleeced, as I have described, under pressure of the whip, of their last hoarded piastres. Those who talk lightly in these days of Ismaïl as a prince rather unfortunate than guilty, and to be pitied in some sort for the betrayal of the country financially to Europe, know nothing of the truth, nor do they realize the enormity of the ruin inflicted by his selfish folly on his fellah subjects. It has been calculated that the total cost of his reign to Egypt amounted to something like 400 millions sterling, nor is this in my opinion an exaggerated estimate, for it had gathered in the whole of the peasant savings of a number of prosperous years, and nearly the whole of their agricultural stock besides the public debt, and left them, moreover, indebted privately to the amount of something like twenty millions to the Greek and other local usurers.

Such had been the causes of Egypt's misfortunes as I learned them at Cairo in the spring of 1876. With regard to the origin of our financial intervention, it was certainly at that time Ismaïl's own foolish doing, and was not, as far as I know, prompted by any direct political motives in England. He most certainly applied to the English Government for financial assistance through Colonel Staunton in the autumn of 1875, and in a way that almost necessitated the assistance having a political character. His reason for choosing England rather than France as the recipient of his confidences was that at the time England was in a far better position financially to help him. The French Government was still crippled by the expense of the war with Germany of 1870, and was really unable to assist him in any effectual way, while, as I have already said, the friendship long existing between England and Turkey, and the abstention of Englishmen so far from commercial intrigues in Egypt had probably convinced him, in company with the general opinion of the Mohammedan East, that England was a non-aggressive power as far as the Ottoman Empire was concerned. Especially in the matter of the Suez Canal the French Government had become an object of suspicion, and it was therefore natural that when Ismaïl resolved to sell his shares in the Canal, it was to England rather than to France that he made the offer of them. I remember well the impression produced in England at the time. It was by no means one of general approval, and Disraeli was much blamed for involving the Government in a transaction which had almost necessarily political consequences. What is, I think, not generally known, at any rate in Egypt, is that the agreement to purchase the Khedive's share for four millions sterling was made not by the English Government collectively, for Lord Derby was averse to it, but on the personal responsibility of the Prime Minister who, without consulting his colleagues other than Lord Derby, they being absent from London, arranged with the London house of Rothschild to advance the money. What may have been in Disraeli's mind politically about it I do not know, but I am very sure that Lord Derby, who was then at the Foreign Office, had no idea connected with it of political aggression. Lord Derby was a man whose view of foreign policy was essentially one of non-intervention, nor had Disraeli as yet succeeded in indoctrinating his party with his own imperialistic ideas. The transaction, nevertheless, was one of evil augury for Egypt, and especially by reason of the part played in it by the Rothschilds. As will be seen later, the financial connection of this too powerful Hebrew house with Egypt was the determining cause, six years later, of England's military intervention.[3]

Mr. Cave's mission, which followed immediately on the purchase of the Canal shares, was without any question Ismaïl's doing also. The object in Ismaïl's mind, as is perfectly clear, when he asked for it, was still further to work the new mine of English political assistance he had discovered, with a view to further loans. He wanted to get some public testimonial, in the shape of a published report, in favour of his continued solvency, and so to re-open to him the European stock exchanges. It was for this purpose that he applied to Colonel Staunton for an English inquiry, and to a large extent he succeeded in his plan. Mr. Cave, who was chosen by the English Government for the inquiry, was a worthy and, I believe, quite disinterested man, but one who lacked experience of the East, and so was specially easy to deceive; he lacked also the fibre necessary for dealing quite courageously with all the facts. Ismaïl, like most spendthrifts, when it came to the point of showing his accounts, had always concealed a part of them, and, with the assistance of Ismaïl Sadyk, now gave a fanciful budget of his revenue, which Cave too readily accepted. He also allowed dust to be thrown in his eyes to some extent as to the misery of the fellahin. It was the Khedive's plan to surround distinguished financial visitors whom he desired to captivate with the show of great wealth. The mission was splendidly entertained and taken about everywhere by the Khedive's officers, who arranged things beforehand, and prevented as far as possible the nakedness of the land from being seen. Thus Cave's report, when it was published, gave only a partial truth. I think too that Cave might have insisted, if he had been of a stronger character, on the fact which lay at the bottom of all Egypt's financial difficulty, namely, that in justice, and indeed it might have been maintained in law, Ismaïl's debts were personal not public ones, and should have been so treated. Cave's weakness on this point was the beginning of the political intervention in favour of the bondholders, and his report led by a necessary logic to the recognition of Ismaïl's debt as a public obligation. Sir Rivers Wilson, who immediately followed him, though a far abler man, was equally inexperienced, and was at that time chosen, I believe, principally for his knowledge of the French language. I knew him intimately, and I knew also, but in a less degree, Cave; and I continued in correspondence with Wilson for some years and am well acquainted with all his Egyptian doings.

My last recollection that winter at Cairo is of a barbaric banquet offered by the Khedive to Mr. Cave and the members of his commission, to which I was by accident invited. It was given in the Viceregal Kiosque at the Pyramids, and was one of those extravagant entertainments Ismaïl was accustomed to dazzle European eyes with, nor was there anything wanting to point the contrast between the wealth of the entertainer and the poverty of those at whose expense it was really given. The table was spread for us literally under the eyes of a starving multitude of peasants, the very peasants Mr. Cave was there to save from ruin. Yet none of us seemed to feel the incongruity of it all. We feasted elaborately, and drank champagne of the best, and went our way, and it is only now that, with a better knowledge of the whole circumstances, I recall the real character of the scene and recognize it for what it in all verity was with its waste and surrounding misery, a true presentment of the twin causes of the coming revolution.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Note. For a fuller and better account of the finance of that time serious students of Egyptian history should consult "Egypt's Ruin" by Theodore Rothstein published by A. C. Fifield, 13. Clifford's Inn, London, in 1910 with an introduction by me.

[2] Note in correction as to Nubar's wealth see [Appendix].

[3] Since this was written much new information with regard to the purchase of the Canal shares has been made public, modifying in some degree the account here given; the main facts however regarding the Rothschilds' connection with it and Disraeli's remain untouched.

CHAPTER II
SIR RIVERS WILSON'S MISSION

On leaving Cairo that spring of 1876 we paid our first visit to the confines of Arabia. It was then more the custom with European tourists than it is now to go on from Egypt into Syria by way of the desert, and we took once more to our camels and our tent life, and with the same Bedouins who had escorted us from Suez, crossed the Suez Canal and made a long tour through the Sinai peninsula and on by Akabah to Jerusalem. As we were strange to the country we passed through, and were still very ignorant of Arabic and had with us no dragoman, we got into some rather perilous adventures which are now amusing to recollect, though at the time they were disagreeable enough. It is perhaps worth recording as a curious accident of travel that as we were passing along the shore of the Gulf of Akabah, which is fringed in places with coral reefs, we had stopped to examine these and to admire the wonderful colours, purple, gold, and vermilion, of the innumerable little fishes which live in them. I was standing thus at the sea's edge, my gun, which I always then carried, in my hand, when I saw a great commotion in the water near me and suddenly, before I was well aware of the cause, a large shark, one of a shoal, leaving the rest came straight to where I stood and was already within a few yards of me before I understood what manner of fish it was or that I was the object of its attack. I had barely time to raise my gun when it turned, as these fishes do, on its side and rose half out of the water to take hold of me, and it was so near me when I fired that my charge of small shot killed it without the need of a second barrel, so that we were able, with the help of a lasso, to bring it high and dry on shore. It was a very large one, nearly ten feet long, and I do not doubt that if I had been a little more careless than I was I might have been carried from the rock into the sea by it. The incident brought home to me the danger which was once so common in Egypt for the fellahin from crocodiles in the Upper Nile, and I have been cautious in the matter of sea bathing ever since.

We fell into trouble, too, with certain Arabs on our way, through our ignorance of the rules and customs of the desert. When camped outside Akabah, we received a visit from Abunjad the well-known Sheykh of the Alawin, a branch of the Howeytat tribe, who had the customary right of escorting travellers to Petra, and whom we managed to offend, with the result that we ended by starting without escort or guides, our only native companions being two Arab boys who had followed us from Mount Sinai, and knew nothing of the northern country. With these we ventured north for Palestine, and presently ran short of water. The wells, when we by fortune found them, proved to be almost dry, and it was only after great hardships under a burning sun that we at last reached an Arab encampment. Things had become so bad for us one night that we had resolved that if at noon on the following day we should have still failed to find water we must abandon our baggage and push on on our best camels for our bare lives to the settled country. An hour, however, before the time agreed on, the happy sound of an ass braying told us that a camp must be near, and presently we spied an Arab child perched on a mound, and from him, under some compulsion of fear, got knowledge of their watering place. It was a beautiful pool of rain water in the hollow of a rock, and here we lay long and quenched our thirst and filled our goat skins. By good fortune it was, the men of the place, Azazimeh Arabs, were away or I doubt if we should have been allowed to take so liberal a share of this "Bounty of God," for they were in possession of the place and had sown a little barley field, as Bedouins often do on the Syrian frontier for the chance of rain, and this was all their drinking store till their corn should be ripe. Nor were they otherwise than justly angry on their return, and we had to watch all night for fear of an attack. It was not till morning that they came with shouts and menaces, but we had already loaded our camels, and being well armed held on our way. Knowing the ways of Bedouins better now, I feel sure that we need not thus have quarrelled with them, and that with a little explanation and payment for our disturbance of their rights they would have received us well. But as it was, we were within a hair's breadth of a serious misadventure, and deserve to be thankful that the following day we at last reached the grass lands between Hebron and Gaza. Here the more settled Arabs gave us a good reception, and having made friends with them the memory of our past danger was soon forgotten. This ended our travels for that year, and from Jerusalem we returned in the early summer by the ordinary sea route to England.

The winter of 1877-8 saw us again in the East, this time with a larger program of adventure. We visited Aleppo, and passed down the Euphrates to Bagdad, and on our return journey made acquaintance with the great Bedouin tribes of Mesopotamia and the Syrian Desert south of Palmyra. We began now to know something of the language, and to understand the customs of the Arabs, and made no more mistakes of the kind I have just described. For this we were largely indebted to the wise counsels of the then English Consul at Aleppo, Mr. Skene, who had had a large experience of Bedouins and their ways, and who taught us to approach them on their nobler side, and putting aside all fear to trust them as friends, appealing to their law of hospitality. The history of this most interesting and successful journey has been very fully written by my wife in her "Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates," in reality a joint work, in which my first political views in regard to Arabian liberty may be traced by those who care to seek them. My sympathy with the Arabs as against the Turks, with whom they were at chronic war, was the result of no pre-conceived idea, and still less of any political plan, but was caused by what I saw, the extreme misgovernment of the settled districts by the Ottoman officials, and the happiness of the still independent tribes. It was a time of much local disorganization. The Russo-Turkish war was in its last desperate throes at Kars and Plevna, and though our good wishes were all with the Moslem armies as against the invading Muscovites, the sight of the miserable Syrian and Mesopotamian villagers being driven in chains as recruits to the sea coast moved us to anger against the imperial government, an anger which the hatred everywhere manifested by the Arabs against the Turks daily intensified. It was impossible in those days of far worse rule than now for any one with the instinct of liberty to do otherwise than resent the Ottoman misgovernment of its Arabic-speaking provinces. It was a government of force and fraud, corrupt and corrupting to the last degree, where every evil engine was employed to enslave and degrade the people, where the Moslems were worse treated than the Christians, and where all alike were pillaged by the Pashas. The Turk in his own home in Asia Minor has a number of honest and manly virtues, but as a master in a subject land he is too often a rapacious tyrant. Every vilayet had been bought with money at Constantinople, and the purchasing Valy was making what fortune he could during his term of office out of those he was given to administer. The land of Bagdad, under Ottoman rule, we had seen turned into a wilderness, Damascus into a decaying city. Everywhere land was falling out of cultivation, and the Government, like a moral plague, was infecting the inhabitants with its own corruption. Can it be wondered at if, in view of these doings, we thought and spoke strongly, and, though our Government at the time was in open alliance with the Porte, our sympathies were with any scheme which might make the Arabian provinces independent of the Empire?

On my return to England I find a record that on the 14th of May, 1878, I was taken by my cousin, Philip Currie (now Lord Currie), who was then his private secretary and one of the highest officials at the Foreign Office, to see Lord Salisbury. Lord Salisbury had just accepted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and, though I knew nothing of it, must have been at the point of signing the famous secret treaty with the Sultan known as the Cyprus Convention, and our journey in Arabian lands had excited his interest to learn from me something about them. In answer to his questions I told him all my thoughts very frankly, and I remember especially suggesting to him the possible independence some day of Syria, and that it might join hands with Egypt against the common misgovernment of their Turkish rulers. To this, however, he by no means responded, saying that there could be no political connection between the two provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and that the case of each stood on a separate basis. He was more influenced by me, however, when I spoke unfavourably of the then much talked of Euphrates Valley Railway scheme, under English guarantee, in which I saw a new danger to Arabian liberty, and I have reason to know that my arguments weighed with him to the extent that he shortly after refused all Foreign Office support to the enterprise, which has remained to this day abandoned. My conversation on this occasion left me with a high opinion of Lord Salisbury's intelligence on Eastern matters, and, though his view of them has never been mine, I have always preserved a strong feeling of his personal integrity, while it began a connection between us never intimate, but always friendly on his part. To the last he allowed me to write to him on these subjects, and though seldom agreeing he invariably responded to my occasional letters with more than the usual official courtesy.

Any hopes, however, that I may have had of persuading Lord Salisbury to my views about the Arabs were speedily dispelled by his attitude that summer at Berlin, when his policy was publicly proclaimed of guaranteeing to the Sultan the whole of his Asiatic dominions. The inner history of the Congress of Berlin as it affected Egypt is so curious, and at the same time so important, that it is necessary I should tell it here as I learned it soon after the events had happened.

It will be remembered that the terrible winter of 1877-8 witnessed the final scenes of the war between Russia and Turkey, and that the spring of the new year found the Czar's army at the gates of Constantinople. The same period had been one of extreme misery in Egypt. The Cave mission, whose arrival I had seen at Cairo, had been followed by other financial missions of less integrity, which had resulted in what was known as the Goschen-Joubert arrangement of the Khedive Ismaïl's debts, a truly leonine settlement, according to which the enormous yearly charge of nearly seven millions sterling had been saddled on the Egyptian revenue, an amount which could only be wrung out of the ruined fellahin by forcing them, under the whip, to mortgage their lands to the Greek usurers who attended the tax-gatherers everywhere on their rounds through the villages. The last two Niles had been very bad ones, and there had been famine in the land from the sea to Assouan. Many thousands of the villagers—men, women, and children—had died that winter of sheer hunger. There had been nothing like it since the beginning of the century. Under these circumstances it was clear that either the Khedive must go bankrupt or a reduction be made on the interest of his debts, the Goschen-Joubert arrangement being abandoned. The former course would have been the more equitable and by far the better one for the country, but in the foreign bondholders' interests this was put aside, and a final attempt was made by these, this time successfully, to secure the diplomatic intervention of the great Powers for yet another settlement between Ismaïl and his creditors. The moment was a favourable one as far as England was concerned, for it coincided with the resolve of the English Government, under Disraeli's guidance, to play a forward political game, and take the leading part in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire. Lord Derby, who so far had gone unwillingly with his chief in his new policy of imperial adventure, now would go no further with him and left the Foreign Office, and, as we have seen, was replaced by Lord Salisbury. It was the signal of a general diplomatic advance, not unaccompanied with menace. The British fleet was brought through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmora, the Russian army was overawed and prevented from entering Stamboul, and under pressure of the English demonstration a treaty of peace was hurriedly drawn up between the Czar and the Sultan, the treaty of San Stefano. On the side of Egypt, at the same time, an official Commission of Inquiry was appointed, which, though nominally international, was intended at the Foreign Office to be mainly an English one, my friend Sir Rivers Wilson being chosen as English commissioner. His appointment was, I believe, almost the first Lord Salisbury signed on taking the command in Downing Street.

It will also be remembered that two months later a secret convention was negotiated at Constantinople by our then Ambassador, Sir Henry Layard, a man of great ability and knowledge of the East, who had acquired the personal confidence of the still youthful Sultan, Abdul Hamid, in accordance with which the island of Cyprus was leased to England and a guarantee given to the Sultan of the integrity of all his Asiatic provinces in lieu of promises of reform to be enforced by the presence in Asia Minor of certain ambulant English consuls, military men, who were to give advice and report grievances. The idea of the Cyprus Convention, certainly in the minds of Disraeli and Salisbury who signed it and of Layard its true author, was to establish informally but none the less effectually an English protectorate over Asiatic Turkey. The acquisition of Cyprus was in their view to be the smallest part of the bargain. The island was really of very little value to England as a place d'armes, and its selection for that purpose was due less to its fitness for the purpose than to a fantastic whim of Disraeli's, backed up by the roseate report of its potential wealth sent in by one of our consuls who had an interest in the island. Disraeli many years before, as a quite young man, had in his novel "Tancred" advanced half jestingly the idea of a great Asiatic empire under an English monarchy, and Cyprus was to be specially included in it as recalling the historic fact that our English king, Richard Cœur de Lion, had once been also its sovereign. The whole thing was a piece of romantic fooling, but Disraeli loved to turn his political jests into realities and to persuade his English followers, whom as a Jew he despised, in all seriousness to the ways of his own folly. The really important object aimed at by Layard in the Convention—and it was certainly his rather than Salisbury's, who was new to office and whose experience the year before at Constantinople had made him anything but a Turcophile—was to acquire the strategic control of Asia Minor, which it was thought might be effected through the ambulant consular posts it created. These were to supervise the civil administration in the provinces, and see that the peasantry were not too much robbed by those who farmed the taxes, and that the recruiting grounds of the Ottoman army were not depopulated by mismanagement. Thus the advance of Russia to the Mediterranean might, it was thought, be checked in Asia as their advance in Europe had been checked at San Stefano.

Looking back at the position now, with our knowledge of subsequent events, and especially of the Sultan Abdul Hamid's character, it seems strange both that the Sultan should have signed such a Convention which, if it had been carried out, would have put Asiatic Turkey as much into English military hands as Egypt is to-day, or that our Foreign Office should have believed in its success, and the epithet applied to it at the time by Gladstone, who denounced it as an "insane Convention," seems more than justified. It must, however, be remembered that as regards Abdul Hamid he had really no choice, with the Russian army still at his doors, but to accept the English alliance even if it should mean tutelage, and also that up to that point England had always proved a reliable and disinterested friend. Layard, on the other hand, was conscious of his personal ascendency at the palace, and he knew how great the prestige was in the Asiatic provinces of the English name. An English Consul in those days held a position of absolute authority with Valys and every class of Ottoman officials, and he may well have thought that this could be indefinitely extended. The honour of England was so great in all Turkish eyes, and her policy towards the Moslem Empire had been so sympathetic that no suspicion existed anywhere of her having selfish plans. Layard, too, was himself a believer in the Turks, and he may have had dreams of playing the part at Constantinople of Maire du Palais, which Lord Cromer has shown us an example of since at Cairo. Now, it is only astonishing that such English dreams should ever have been indulged in, or that by Moslems England's disinterestedness should ever have been trusted.

Lastly, it will be remembered that a month after the secret signature of the Cyprus Convention, the great European Congress of 1878 met at Berlin. It had been called together principally at Disraeli's instance, and was to be the most important meeting of the Powers since the Congress of Paris. Like the earlier Congress its special object was to determine the fate of European Turkey and of the Christian subjects of the Sultan, and on England's part to revise the treaty of San Stefano. On its success in this direction Disraeli had staked his whole reputation as a statesman. England had intervened, according to his showing, on the highest motives of policy as Turkey's best and most disinterested friend, and it was on her approval as such by the other great Powers that depended his political position at home no less than abroad. So vital, indeed, to Disraeli did success at the Congress appear, that he went himself to it as chief plenipotentiary, taking Lord Salisbury, who was still new to diplomacy, with him as a second ambassador, while Russia was represented by Prince Gortschakoff, France by M. Waddington, and Italy by Count Corti, Prince Bismarck presiding as host over the whole august assemblage. I may add that Currie accompanied Lord Salisbury as précis writer on the occasion, and Lord Rowton, Disraeli.

The general proceedings of the Congress are of course well known, and I need not here describe them, but what has never been published is the following all important incident, of which, as already said, I learned the particulars some little time after it occurred. The Congress assembled on the 13th of June, and as the matters to be discussed were of the highest moment, and there was not a little suspicion of each other among the plenipotentiaries in regard to a possible partition of Turkey, it was proposed at the outset that a preliminary declaration should be made by each Ambassador affirming that his Government came to the Congress unfettered by any secret engagement as to the questions in dispute. This declaration Disraeli and Salisbury, who seem to have been taken by surprise, and were unprepared to make a clean breast of their secret doings with the Sultan, had not the presence of mind to refuse, and no less than the others formally agreed and gave their word to—it must be remembered that both were new to diplomacy. It may therefore be imagined how high a surprise it was, and scandal at Berlin when a few weeks later, 9th July, the text of the hidden Cyprus Convention was published in London by one of the evening papers. One Marvin, an Oriental traveller and linguist, but who had no official position at the Foreign Office, had been imprudently employed as translator and copyist of the Turkish text by Currie, and had sold his information for a round sum to the "Globe." The publication came as a thunderclap on our Embassy at Berlin, and though the authenticity of the text was promptly denied in London, the truth at Berlin could not long be concealed. Our two plenipotentiaries found themselves confronted with the unexplainable fact that they had perpetrated a gross breach of faith on their European colleagues, and stood convicted of nothing less than a direct and recorded lie. The discovery threatened to break up the Congress altogether. Prince Gortschakoff declared himself outraged, and he was joined in his anger on the part of France by M. Waddington. Both gave warning that they would withdraw at once from the sittings, and M. Waddington went so far as to pack up his trunks to leave Berlin. The situation was an ugly one, and was only saved by the cynical good offices of Bismarck, on whom Disraeli, as a fellow cynic and a man of bold ideas, had made a sympathetic impression. The German Chancellor, as "honest broker," brought about the following compromise, with which M. Waddington declared himself satisfied. It was agreed between the French and English plenipotentiaries:

1. That as a compensation to France for England's acquisition of Cyprus, France should be allowed on the first convenient opportunity, and without opposition from England, to occupy Tunis.

2. That in the financial arrangements being made in Egypt, France should march pari passu with England; and,

3. That England should recognize in a special manner the old French claim of protecting the Latin Christians in Syria.

It was in consideration of Disraeli's surrender on these three points that Waddington consented to remain at Berlin and join the other ambassadors in arranging the Balkan settlement, which eventually was come to more or less on the lines of the English proposals. The price thus paid to France by Disraeli of a province belonging to his ally the Sultan, it is curious to reflect, enabled that statesman to return a little later to London and claim a public triumph, with the famous boast in his mouth that he had brought back "peace with honour." A curious history truly, and deserving to be specially noted as marking the point of departure for England of a new policy of spoliation and treacherous dealing in the Levant foreign to her traditional ways. To the Cyprus intrigue are directly or indirectly referable half the crimes against Oriental and North African liberty our generation has witnessed. It suggested the immediate handing over of Bosnia to Austria. It helped to frustrate a sound settlement in Macedonia. It put Tunis under the heel of France, and commenced the great partition of Africa among the European Powers, with the innumerable woes it has inflicted on its native inhabitants, from Bizerta to Lake Chad, and from Somaliland to the Congo. Above all it destroyed at a critical moment all England's influence for good in the Ottoman Empire. It embittered Moslem hearts against her in 1881 and 1882, and, as I will show, was a powerful factor in the more violent events of those troubled years in Egypt. Also it most certainly defeated its own end in Asiatic Turkey if England's co-operation in reform was really contemplated. The doings at the Congress opened the Sultan's eyes to the danger there might be in any English co-operation, and also beyond question hardened his heart to a policy contrary to English advice, and in which he has been only too successful, that of suppressing all liberty and self-government among his own Turkish subjects. To it the Liberal party at Constantinople owes more than to anything else its ruthless persecution, and it is even not too much to say that whatever woes have been inflicted on the Armenians have been caused by the false hopes raised at Berlin of their emancipation by England's moral help, a help her own immorality has made her powerless to give. The immediate effect in Egypt of the compromise come to with M. Waddington was the despatch of a telegram from Berlin to Wilson at Alexandria ordering him, much to his chagrin and surprise, to see that in all the financial appointments made in connection with his official inquiry, France should receive an absolutely equal share. It was, indeed, though unknown to Wilson at the time, the determining cause, a year later, of the Anglo-French condominium.[4]

Public affairs were in this position when in the autumn of that same year, 1878, I found myself once more upon my road eastwards. My journey of the winter before to Bagdad, and especially the success I had had in a matter much more interesting to me than any politics, the purchase and bringing safely home of the Arab mares which were to form the nucleus of my now well-known stud at Crabbet, had roused considerable interest and curiosity in England, and I had spent the summer preparing my wife's journal for publication, and it was now in the Press. We were not content, however, with this, and had made up our minds to a new expedition still more adventurous than any we had yet attempted, and were on our way back to Damascus, from which starting point we designed to penetrate into central Arabia and visit Nejd, the original home and birthplace of the Arabian horse. Our sea-voyage from Marseilles would touch at Alexandria, and it so happened that I found on board the Messageries steamer at Marseilles my friend Sir Rivers Wilson who had just been appointed Finance Minister in Egypt, and in his company we made the voyage. During the six days' passage I had ample opportunity to learn from him all that had happened during the past two years at Cairo, and the tale he told me of the condition of the country was a very terrible one. I remember well his account of that most dramatic of the many crimes of the Khedive Ismaïl, his murder of the Mufettish Ismaïl Sadyk, an act of treachery which more than any other alienated from the Khedive the allegiance, I will not say of his Egyptian subjects at large, for that he had already lost, but even of that group of slaves and servants by which he was surrounded.

Ismaïl Sadyk was an Algerian by birth but had come at an early age to Egypt, and had by his abilities risen in the viceregal service, his first connection with the Court having been, I believe, under Abbas I as a superintendent of his stud. Under Saïd and Ismaïl he had served in various official capacities and had made himself, as we have seen, Ismaïl's âme damnée in the work of extracting their last piastres from the fellahin. With all his cruelties to them—and he had shown inexhaustible ingenuity in devising means for their spoliation—he had maintained a certain honourable repute at Cairo as an Arab gifted with the traditional virtue of generosity and a large liberality in spending the wealth he had acquired, and so as an old man was not unpopular. For the last few years of his life he had been Finance Minister, and to Ismaïl had always proved himself a devoted and faithful servant. Ismaïl had nevertheless betrayed him a few months before the time I am writing of basely to his death, and under circumstances so revolting that the Egyptian world, used as it was to crime in high places, had been shocked and confounded. The Khedive's motive had been the wholly base and selfish one of screening himself by casting upon his too faithful Minister the blame of certain frauds he had himself committed, and he had insured his silence by having the old man murdered almost in his own presence.

The details given me by Wilson were as follows: Ismaïl had been in the habit, in his dealings with the various European commissioners whom he had from time to time invited to inquire into his financial affairs, of concealing as far as was possible from them the extreme truth of his senseless extravagances, and with his Minister Ismaïl Sadyk's help had once more now, as on previous occasions, presented to the new official commission a false statement of his debts. The pressure, however, on him was severe, as the commission had received a hint, if I remember rightly, from Riaz Pasha, that they were being befooled on this point, and he, fearing that the whole truth would come out, and when the matter should be fully gone into by the commission his Minister might tell the facts, determined to be beforehand with him and make of him his scapegoat and victim. He took the execution of the deed into his own hands. It was his custom with his Minister, with whom he was on the closest possible terms of personal friendship, to call sometimes for the old man in the afternoon at the Finance Office and take him for a drive with him to Shubra or to one or another of his palaces; and so on this occasion he did, and, suspecting nothing, the Minister mounted with him and they drove together to the Jesireh Palace and there got down and entered. No sooner, however, were they inside than Ismaïl on some pretext left him alone in one of the saloons and immediately sent to him his two younger sons Husseyn and Hassan and his aide-de-camp, Mustafa Bey Fehmy, when the princes struck and insulted the unarmed Minister and hustled him on board one of the viceregal steamers which was lying with steam up beside the quay, and there, though not without a vigorous resistance, the old man was despatched. According to Wilson, the actual doer of the deed was Mustafa Bey, acting under the Khedive's order, and he added that the truth had been disclosed through the young aide-de-camp falling ill of fever soon after and telling it in his delirium. I have reason, however, to believe that as far as Mustafa's personal act went this was a mistake, though the rest of the facts have been fully confirmed to me, and that the Mufettish was handed over by Mustafa to Ishak Bey, in whose charge he perished, though whether at once or a little later is uncertain. Some say that Ismaïl Sadyk was thrown as many another had been thrown, with a stone tied to his feet into the Nile, others that he was conveyed alive as far as to between Waddy Halfa and Dongola and there strangled. All that is quite beyond dispute is that once on board the steamer he was never seen again alive, and that the steamer having gone up the river, it was some weeks later officially announced that the Mufettish was away in Upper Egypt for a change of air and ultimately that he had there taken to drink and died. It is also certain that Mustafa, a mild young man and unused to scenes of violence, and being himself, as the Mufettish was, of Algerine extraction, was so horrified at the rôle he had been ordered to play in it that he had a long and dangerous illness. It was this experience that a year later caused him to take the part he did against his master Ismaïl and ultimately to join Arabi in the earlier phases of the revolution of 1881-2. He is the same Mustafa Fehmy who has for so many years filled the office of Prime Minister in Egypt.

Of all these things we talked as we sat day after day on the deck of the Messageries steamer, and, especially, of course, of Wilson's own important mission as Ismaïl Sadyk's successor. Wilson's hopes at that time were high regarding his own administrative success, and he showed a keen appreciation of the responsibility of the charge he had undertaken of restoring Egypt to prosperity and rescuing the fellahin from their financial bondage, but he was also fully aware of the difficulties which lay before him. The Khedive's character he had learned to understand, and he was prepared to find in him an astute and unscrupulous opponent. But he counted on his own bonhomie, tact, and knowledge of the world to be able to live on friendly terms with him, and to avoid what personal risks he might run. He relied too on his French education, for he had lived much at Paris, to preserve intact the dual character of the Anglo-French Ministry, of which he formed a part, and above all he relied on Nubar. In Nubar he reposed unlimited confidence, believing him to be a heaven-born Eastern statesman, and one devoted to English interests. He had, moreover, behind him, as he thought, the full support of the London Foreign Office, and what was perhaps even a stronger stay in Europe, the interest and power of the house of Rothschild. On this last he knew he could rely, for he had just persuaded them on his passage through Paris to advance that fatal loan of nine millions on the Khedivial Domains which was to bind them to the cause of European intervention whenever necessary on the part of the bondholders. To myself, who knew Wilson well, though I sympathized to the full with his humanitarian hopes and personal aspirations, there seemed to be certain elements of doubt in his position which did not augur altogether well for his success.

We parted at Alexandria in good hope that all would go well with him in a mission so much one of despair to a ruined state, but with misgivings. The difficulties before him we both guessed would be immense, and in spite of his excellent qualities of heart and head and his great savoir vivre, I had my fears for him. The event more than justified my forebodings, and in a shorter time than either of us could have thought possible.

Sir Rivers Wilson's brief career as Finance Minister in Egypt failed through many causes. It was of ill omen, I think, at the very outset that it should have commenced with a new and heavy loan, the proceeds of which it is difficult to find were put to any serious purpose. Errors of administration, too, there certainly were which inflicted great injustice on the people, and which, as will be seen later, prepared the way for a general discontent. It is not, however, necessary for me to go into these, for they are matters of notoriety to be found in the Blue Books. Wilson's excuse for them must be found in the fact that in all matters of internal policy he trusted absolutely for guidance to Nubar, and that he greatly overrated Nubar's power to deal with them. If Wilson had been more of a statesman and less of a financier he would not have blundered as he did into political difficulties which, with a little more experience of the arts of government, might have been easily avoided. Nubar was a weak reed on which to lean. As a Christian and an alien it was not difficult for one so astute as Ismaïl to rouse Mohammedan opinion against him, and when, thinking only of restoring the financial equilibrium, Wilson began a series of crude retrenchments among the native officials, a discontented class was at once brought into existence which gave the Khedive his opportunity of diverting the popular ill-will from himself to his Christian Ministers. What made it the more easy for him was that in these retrenchments no European salaries were cut down. The agreement with France had made it imperative that each Englishman employed in Egypt should be duplicated with a Frenchman, and Wilson did not dare touch one of them. Wilson, as holding the purse strings, had to bear the odium of all this.

Nor did he, in spite of his good intentions, succeed in relieving the peasantry in any way of their burdens. It was an essential part of his program that the Khedive should remain solvent, and that meant that the interest on the enormous debt should be punctually paid. The nine millions advanced by the Rothschilds went mostly in paying the more urgently immediate calls, and not a tax was reduced or a demand remitted. On the contrary, the régime of the whip went on, even more mercilessly than before, in the villages, and an additional terror was introduced into the agricultural situation by the institution, at great expense and most futilely carried out, of a new revenue survey, under English direction, which was interpreted as the prelude of a still enhanced land-tax. Lastly, the project, lightly suggested by Wilson, of rescinding the Moukabalah arrangement, which would have meant confiscation by the Government of landed property representing something like fifteen millions, disturbed every landowner's mind, and led to the belief that even worse things might be expected of the English Minister than any they had suffered from his predecessors. It seems to me astonishing now with my better knowledge of Egypt that any one so intelligent and well meaning as Wilson undoubtedly was should have fallen into such errors, and I half suspect that some of them were suggested to him for his discomfiture by the Khedive himself. The climax of the Wilson-Nubar political unwisdom was reached when, without any arrears of pay being given them, the native army, including 2,500 officers, began to be disbanded. This put the alien Ministry finally into the Khedive's hands, and it was a chance Ismaïl did not throw away.

The history of the émeute of February, 1879, which overthrew the Nubar-Wilson Ministry, needs to be recounted here as it really happened, for the truth about it will not be found in any published history. The Khedive was, as we have seen, anxious to divert the popular hatred with which he was regarded in Egypt from himself to his new Ministers, and he was also most desirous of ridding himself of their tutelage. By an Act called the Rescript of 1878 he had abdicated his personal control of the revenue and the administration into their hands, and used as he was for eighteen years to absolute power in Egypt it irked him already to have lost it. He had only signed the Rescript as an alternative to bankruptcy, and this being averted he did not intend to stand by the letter of his bond. Being also an astute judge of character, he had seen at once the weakness of the Ministry, how Wilson and his French colleague, de Blignières, depended, in their foreign ignorance of Egyptian things, altogether on Nubar for their knowledge how to act, and also how helpless Nubar himself was as a Christian to rule a Mohammedan country.

Nubar was known to the Mohammedan official class as an Armenian adventurer, who had enriched himself as agent of the loan-mongers of Europe at the public expense, and to the fellahin as the author of the International Tribunals, an institution extolled by foreigners, but to them especially odious as having laid them more than any other agency had done in bondage to the Greek usurers. As these Courts were then administered in Egypt, a fellah who had once put his signature to any paper for money borrowed could be sued before foreign judges according to a foreign procedure and in a foreign language, without the smallest chance, if he was a poor man, of defending himself, or of showing, as was often the case, that the figures had been altered or the whole paper a forgery, and he might be deprived of his land and of all he possessed before he well knew what the claim made on him rightly was. Nubar was known especially for this, and was without following of any native kind or supported by any opinion but that of the foreign commercial class of Alexandria. It was therefore through Nubar that Ismaïl saw the new régime could be most easily attacked, and most surely reduced to impotence. All that was needed to overthrow it was a public native demonstration against the unpopular Christian, and this the discontent of the 2,500 officers cashiered and cheated of pay and pension made it a very easy matter to arrange.

Ismaïl's chief agents in getting up the émeute of February were Shahin Pasha, one of his own Court servants, and Shahin's brother-in-law, Latif Effendi Selim, who, as Director of the Military College, held a position specially advantageous for the purpose. By these a demonstration of the students of the college was arranged, which at the hour named marched through the streets of Cairo announcing their intention of demanding the dismissal of the obnoxious Ministry, and they were joined by the crowd and especially by such of the cashiered officers as chanced to be upon their way, and it was so arranged that they should arrive at the Government offices at the hour when the Ministers were about to leave it. There they found Nubar Pasha in the act of stepping into his carriage, and they insulted and assaulted him, Nubar's moustache being pulled and his ears boxed. A general popular demonstration followed, and presently the first regiment of the Khedivial Guard under its colonel Ali Bey Fehmy, which had been held in readiness, appeared upon the scene, and a little after the Khedive himself. A few shots were then fired over the heads of the demonstrators, and the Khedive having ordered them to their homes the crowd dispersed. The program, arranged beforehand with Ali Bey, had been successfully carried out, and the Khedive was able to claim of the English and French Consuls, to whom he immediately appealed, the necessity of Nubar's dismissal, and to persuade them that but for his powerful intervention and authority with the people worse things would have happened. Nubar therefore was advised to resign, and a Moslem official of the Khedive's choosing, Ragheb Pasha, was allowed to be named Prime Minister in his place. With Ragheb, a special adherent of his own, at the Ministry of the Interior, Ismaïl knew that Wilson and de Blignières would be powerless to administer the country, and that their fall also must speedily follow.

Nubar having been thus successfully disposed of, Wilson's tenure of office as Finance Minister became, as the Khedive had calculated, all but impossible, and his fall was hastened by extraneous circumstances. Our then Consul-General in Egypt, Vivian (afterwards Lord Vivian and Ambassador at Rome) had been estranged from Wilson by a personal quarrel which had taken place between them, and when in his political difficulties Wilson appealed to him for support, the support was grudgingly given or altogether withheld. Wilson's final discomfiture soon followed; an incident, somewhat similar to that of February, was arranged in March at Alexandria, on which occasion he and his wife were hustled and hurt by the mob, and when Wilson laid his complaint before the Foreign Office it refused him any efficient backing for redress. He was advised, as Nubar had been, to resign, and, there being no other course left him, he retired from office and returned to Europe.

I have an interesting letter from Wilson of this date. Writing on 30th April, 1879, he says: "You will I daresay have heard that I have been upset by that little scoundrel the Khedive. He didn't quite have me assassinated, as you not without reason imagined might be the case, but he had me attacked in the street and very roughly handled, and now he has had the satisfaction of getting rid of me altogether, H. M.'s Govt., with their usual loyalty to their agents, having left me to my fate. Crepy Vivian is the cause and chief abettor of this sudden overthrow of arrangements which he was instructed specially to protect. Partly from jealousy, and a good deal from want of intelligence, with the addition of a great deal of vanity, he went at once into the Khedive's camp. His Highness, whose highest art of government lies in the disunion of the people he has to deal with, might reasonably have expected to make a split between Blignières and myself, or between one or both of us and Nubar, but in his wildest dreams he never could have hoped that the English Consul-General would become his toady and instrument for the overthrow of the Ministry imposed on him by an English Government.... We leave on the 6th and shall get to London about the 15th. I am glad to be out of the place now. The whole thing is going to the devil. The country is pestilential with corruption. The French and English Governments seem afraid of acting, and for the moment the Khedive rides rampant and is bleeding the country to death. The smash cannot be delayed, but in the interval it is dreadful to think of the mischief and misery that are being worked."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] I have given the story of the arrangement made with Waddington as I heard it first from Lord Lytton at Simla in May, 1879. The details were contained in a letter, which he showed me, written to him from Berlin, while the Congress was still sitting, by a former diplomatic colleague and have since been confirmed to me from more than one quarter, though with variations. In regard to the main feature of the agreement, the arrangement about Tunis, I had it very plainly stated to me in the autumn of 1884 by Count Corti who had been Italian Ambassador at the Congress. According to his account, the shock of the revelation to Disraeli had been so great, that he took to his bed, and for four days did not appear at the sittings, leaving Lord Salisbury to explain matters as he best could. He said there had been no open rupture with Waddington, the case having been submitted by Waddington to his fellow ambassadors, who agreed that it was one that could not publicly be disputed, "Il faut la guerre ou se taire." The agreement was a verbal one between Waddington and Salisbury, but was recorded in a dispatch subsequently written by the French Ambassador in London, in which he reminded the latter of the conversation held in Berlin, and so secured its acknowledgment in writing.

See [Appendix V.] as to the Berlin Congress.

[CHAPTER III]
TRAVELS IN ARABIA AND INDIA

While these important events had been happening in Egypt I had been away, still travelling with my wife on our new adventure in Central Arabia, far removed from all knowledge of them or of the affairs of the outside world.

On our way to Damascus, where we were to begin our serious campaign, we had stopped for some days in Cyprus, being curious to look at the new English possession, just acquired at the cost of so much scandal, which we found receiving its first lessons in English administration at the hands of Sir Garnet Wolseley. The island was still in its summer heat, no rain having fallen, and seemed to us little better than a dusty wilderness. We called on Wolseley at his government house at Nicosia, and found him making the best of a rather forlorn and very isolated position. In his talk with us he put as good a face as he could on the outlook of this latest "gem of Empire," but it was clear that in his professional mind the island had no great merit, and was rather in the nature of that gross of spectacles brought home from the fair we read of in the "Vicar of Wakefield." It was difficult, indeed, to see what use it could be put to, or how it could be made to pay its cost of management. Its acquisition had already begun to bring discredit to the English name, and it was generally spoken of, we found among the Mohammedans of Syria, as a backshish taken by England for services rendered to the Sultan.

At Damascus we met several interesting personages, among others the old hero of the Algerian war with France, Seyyid Abd-el-Kader, and that other in some ways hero, the ex-leader of the Turkish constitutional party, Midhat Pasha. My impression of the latter, much as I was inclined to sympathize with Mohammedan reform, was not favourable. Personally he was unimpressive, of no distinguished appearance, and with a certain boastful and self-assertive manner which suggested vanity as a leading characteristic. In a long conversation I had with him on the subject of Ottoman regeneration, I found his ideas shallow and of that commonplace European kind which so often in the East do service for original thought and depth of conviction. His ideas of reform for the Empire, and of the Syrian vilayet of which he had just been appointed Valy, as he expounded them to me, were wholly material ones, the construction of railroads, canals, and tramways, all excellent things in their way, but leaving untouched the real necessities of the administration and which, as he had no funds whatever at his disposal for public works, were in his own province quite illusory. Of the larger matters of economy, justice, and protection for the poor, he did not speak, nor did he show himself in the smallest degree in sympathy with the people of the province he had come to govern. Indeed, he was imbued with more than the usual Turkish contempt for everything Arabian, which he took no pains to conceal, and his avowed methods in dealing with the Bedouins were brutal in the extreme. This naturally repelled me. Nevertheless I cannot help regretting now that I did not make some effort at the time of his misfortunes to rouse public feeling in his favour in England, when such might have perhaps saved him from the terrible punishment he suffered at the Sultan's hands. I did not, however, at that time know all the facts, and it was only in 1884 that I learned, from a source on which I could rely, the true history of Midhat's trial on the false charge of murder brought against him three years before. This is so important a matter that I make no excuse for relating it here in detail.

It may be remembered that when I was at Constantinople in 1873 I had been cared for during a serious illness by Doctor Dickson, the then physician of the British Embassy, with whom I had formed a very pleasant intimacy. This worthy old man, who had already at that time been some thirty-five years in Turkey, had become thoroughly orientalized and possessed a wider experience and more complete knowledge of all things Ottoman than perhaps any other Englishman then living. He had, moreover, a loyal sympathy with the people among whom he had so long lived, and had retained with it a very high integrity and sense of old-fashioned English honour, which made him the most capable and reliable witness possible in regard to events which had come under his notice. His evidence, therefore, on what I am about to relate may be considered as absolutely final on the matter it touches. In 1884 I was again at Constantinople, and it was then that he gave it me; and it seemed to me so important as a corrective to history that I at once on the day I heard it wrote it down. It is textually as follows:

"Nov. 3, 1884. Doctor Dickson was sent by the English Embassy to investigate the circumstances of Abd-el-Aziz' death; and he gave us a most precise account of all he had seen at the palace that day. The party of doctors consisted of a Greek, Marco Pasha, of an old Englishman who had been Lord Byron's doctor, and several others. They found the body in the guard house and examined it carefully. The Sultan was dressed in a silk shirt, such as the caïquejis wear, plain without stripes, and pink silk trousers. When stripped the body was found without scratch or bruise, 'the most beautiful body in the world,' with the exception of the cuts in the two arms on the inside where the arteries are. The cut on the left arm was deep to the bone and Dr. Dickson had put his finger into the wound. That on the right was imperfect and the artery was not severed. They were manifestly the cause of death. The other doctors were satisfied with this examination and went away; but Dr. Dickson and the other English doctor insisted upon taking the evidence of the Sultan's mother, and this was her account: Abd-el-Aziz had twice since his deposition tried to destroy himself, once by trying to throw himself down a well, once into the Bosphorus, but had been prevented; and the Sultana had been warned to give him no instrument with which he could effect his purpose. When therefore he had asked her for a mirror and scissors to trim his beard she had chosen the smallest pair she possessed, and thought it impossible he should harm himself with them. She occupied the room next to his, and there were always one or two girls on watch when she was not herself with him. It happened, however, that one afternoon he had ordered the girls out and bolted the door, saying he wished to be alone; and the girls did not dare disobey. But when half an hour was passed they came and told her, and at first she was not alarmed, but bade them wait at the door and listen. Then they came back and said they heard nothing, and at the end of the hour she herself went, followed by her women, and pushed the door open. They found the Sultan leaning on his side on the sofa dead in this position.

[Here in my journal is a sketch.]

"The sofa and the curtains of the room were of velvet, red on yellow ground. And Dr. Dickson's colleague examined the place and found the left arm of the sofa saturated with blood, and a great pool of coagulated blood on the floor beneath; also on the middle of the sofa a small mark of blood corresponding with the wound on the right arm, but though he examined carefully there was not a speck elsewhere than close to the sofa, so that it was impossible there could have been any struggle or murder. As the Sultana said: 'If he was murdered the murderer must have been myself, for I was in the next room and nobody else could have come near him.' At the trial of Midhat and the rest for murder, they produced a linen, not a silk, shirt, with a cut in the side as from a sword thrust, a pair of green or yellow trousers, and a fur dressing gown, not those which were on the corpse, and chintz covers of the sofa and chintz curtains sprinkled with blood, not those of the room where the body was found. Dr. Dickson had thereupon written a protest stating what he knew, and had given it to Lord Dufferin, begging him to have it handed as evidence to the President of the Court. But Dufferin would not interfere without instructions, and while he telegraphed, or pretended to telegraph, Midhat was condemned. Marco Pasha, he says, must have been induced to give the evidence he did. The story of men having been seen climbing in and out of the window was ridiculous, as it was so high from the ground the men must have broken their legs jumping out. Dr. Dickson is a very precise old gentleman, and the sort of witness whose evidence would be accepted by any jury in the world. I therefore entirely believe his account, improbable as at first sight it seems, that a Sultan should not have been murdered and should have committed suicide. Midhat and Damad died in chains at Taif some months ago, having been starved to death. Midhat's end was hastened by a carbuncle, but he was none the less made away with. The Sheykh el Islam has also recently died there, who gave the fetwa authorizing Abd-el-Aziz' deposition. This act of terror has given Abdul Hamid the absolute power he now holds."

Another person of importance to my narrative whom we met that autumn of 1878 at Damascus was Sir Edward Malet, at that time Secretary of Embassy at Constantinople, and who was making a tour of Syria partly for his amusement, partly to gather information. During my diplomatic career I had served twice under his excellent father, and had been very intimate with his family and with himself from the days when we were both attachés, and I am therefore able to speak of his character, which has been strangely misunderstood in Egypt, from intimate personal knowledge. Malet was a man of fair ordinary abilities, gifted with much industry, caution, and good sense. Having been born, so to say, in diplomacy and put into the service by his father when he was only sixteen, he had had a thoroughly professional training, and, as far as the traditions and usages of his work went, he was an entirely competent public servant. He could write a good plain despatch, and one which might be trusted to say not a word more than his instructions warranted, and would commit his Government to nothing not intended. He had the talents which are perhaps the most useful under the ordinary circumstances of the service to which he belonged, prudence, reticence and a ready self-effacement, those in fact which should distinguish a discreet family solicitor,—and the duty of a diplomatist, except in very rare cases, is in no way different from that of a solicitor. Imagination, however, Malet had none, nor initiative, nor any power of dealing on his own responsibility with occasions requiring strong action and prompt decision. He was the last man in the world to lead an intrigue or command a difficult situation. Personally he was amiable, without being attractive, and he had retained a certain boyishness of mind which in his unofficial moments was very apparent. His industry was great and his conduct irreproachable. As a quite young man this was very noticeable. He always preferred his work, however little interesting, to any form of amusement, and even when on leave would spend his spare afternoons copying despatches with us in his father's chancery rather than be at the trouble of inventing occupation for himself elsewhere. I record this because he has been credited in Egypt with an ambitious and intriguing restlessness which was the precise opposite of his very quiet character. Neither in pleasure nor in work had he the smallest spirit of adventure. Otherwise it is possible that he might have accompanied us, as I proposed to him to do, to Arabia, but he was not one to leave the beaten track, and, though I interested him as far as I could in my more romantic plan, he preferred to follow the common tourist road, and so went on after a few days to Jerusalem.

Our own journey was a very different one, and proved to be of even more interest than I had anticipated. The full detail of it has been published both in English and in French, under the title "A Pilgrimage to Nejd," and so I will deal, with it here briefly. To narrate it in a very few words: we travelled by the Haj Road as far as Mezarib and from thence to the Jebel Hauran, where one of the Druse chiefs of the Atrash family provided us with a rafyk or guide, and so passed down the Wady Sirhán by Kâf to Jôf where Mohammed el Aruk, son of the Sheykh of Tudmor, who was with us, had relations. Thence, after some stay with these, we crossed the Nefud, a hazardous passage of ten days through the great sand desert to Haïl and, though we had no letters or introductions of any kind, were received by the Emir Mohammed Ibn Rashid, the then sovereign of independent Nejd, with all possible honour. Our quality of English people was a sufficient passport for us in his eyes, and the fact of our visits made the previous year to so many of the Anazeh and Shammar Sheykhs, rumours of which had reached him. By this time we had learned sufficient Arabic to be able to carry on a conversation, and we found him courteous and amiable, and exceedingly interested to hear all we had to tell him about the affairs of the great world from which Nejd is so completely shut off by the surrounding deserts. On matters which at all concerned Arabia he was curious to learn our opinion, and especially as to the characters of the various Bedouin Chiefs, his enemies or rivals. European politics interested him very little, and hardly more the politics of Constantinople or Egypt, for at that time the Sultan, though Nejd was called at Bagdad a province of the empire, was in no way recognized by the Wahhabi Princes as their sovereign, and the only relations they had had with him for a century had been those of a hostile character. The recollection of Mohammed Ali's invasion of Nejd was still a living memory, and Midhat Pasha's more recent seizure of El Hasa on the Persian Gulf and his abortive expedition to Jôf were much resented at Haïl. It stood us in good stead with Ibn Rashid that we had come to him without the intervention of any Ottoman authority.

The result of this friendly visit to the capital of independent Arabia, with the view I obtained there of the ancient system of free government existing for so many centuries in the heart of that wonderful peninsula, was to confirm me in the enthusiastic feelings of love and admiration I already entertained for the Arabian race. It was indeed with me a political "first love," a romance which more and more absorbed me, and determined me to do what I could to help them to preserve their precious gift of independence. Arabia seemed to me in the light of a sacred land, where I had found a mission in life I was bound to fulfil. Nor do I think that I exaggerated the value of the traditional virtues I saw practised there.

By nearly all Orientals the Bedouin system of government is looked upon as little else than brigandage, and on the confines of civilization it has, in fact, a tendency to degenerate into such. But in the heart of Arabia itself it is not so. In Nejd alone of all the countries of the world I have visited, either East or West, the three great blessings of which we in Europe make our boast, though we do not in truth possess them, are a living reality: "Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood," names only even in France, where they are written up on every wall, but here practically enjoyed by every free man. Here was a community living as our idealists have dreamed, without taxes, without police, without conscription, without compulsion of any kind, whose only law was public opinion, and whose only order a principle of honour. Here, too, was a people poor yet contented, and, according to their few wants, living in abundance, who to all questions I asked of them (and in how many lands had I not put the same in vain) had answered me invariably, "Thank God, we are not as the other nations are. Here we have our own government. Here we are satisfied." It was this that filled me with astonishment and pleasure, and that worked my conversion from being an idle onlooker at the misfortunes of the Eastern world into one filled with zeal for the extension of those same blessings of liberty to the other nations held in bondage. Our journey back to the civilized but less happy world of Irak and Southern Persia, which we visited in turn in the following spring, only confirmed and intensified my conviction. How wretched a contrast indeed to Nejd were the lands of the Lower Euphrates, inhabited by the same Arab race, but a race demoralized, impoverished, and brutalized by Ottoman rule! How still more wretched Persian Arabistan! I cast about in my mind for some means of restoring them to their lost dignity, their lost prosperity and self-respect, and, for a moment, I saw in England's protection, if it could be given, a possible road for them to salvation. It was with ideas of this sort taking shape and substance in my mind that, after a most difficult land journey from Bagdad to Bushire on the Persian Gulf and thence by sea to Kurrachi, I found myself at last in India, where experiences of another kind were awaiting me and a new lesson in the economy of Eastern things.

My reason for going on to India, after the severe journey we had just made, was that on our arrival at Bushire we had found letters awaiting us from Lord Lytton, who had for many years been my most intimate friend, inviting us to pay him a visit at Simla. Lytton, of whose endearing personal qualities I need here say nothing, for I have already paid that tribute to his beloved memory, had been like myself in the diplomatic service, and I had served with him at Lisbon in 1865, and we had written poetry and lived together in an intimacy which had been since continued. Now in 1879 he had been a little over two years Viceroy in India, and at the time we arrived at Simla was just bringing his first Afghan campaign to a successful conclusion, and he signed the Treaty of Gandamak in the first month of our staying with him. Lytton, who was a man of very superstitious temperament, though a rationalist in his religious beliefs, spent much of his spare time during the war, hard worker though he was, in making fire-balloons which he launched at intervals, arguing from their quick or slow ascensions good or bad fortune to his army. Not that he allowed such results to decide his action, for he was a steady worker and sound reasoner, but it soothed his nerves, which were always highly strung, to have these little intimations of a supernatural kind in which he persuaded himself half to believe. He connected my coming to Simla with the good turn the war had taken, and looked upon me as a fortunate influence as long as I was with him. He made me the confidant of all his thoughts, and from him I learned many interesting things in the region of high politics which I need not here particularize, though some of them will be found embodied in this memoir. With my Arabian ideas, as a man of romance and a poet, he at once professed his sympathy, and gave instructions to Sir Alfred Lyall, who was then his Foreign Secretary, to talk the matter over with me and give me all possible information.

The Indian Government was at that time not at all disinclined to make a forward movement in the Persian Gulf. There had been for many years past a kind of protectorate exercised by the Indian Navy of the Arabian seaports, a protectorate which, being rigidly restricted to the prevention of piracy and quarrels between the tribes at sea without any attempt at interfering with them on shore, had been wholly beneficent, and the recent assertion of the Ottoman claim to sovereignty over them was resented at Calcutta. The Sultan Abdul Hamid too had already begun to alarm our authorities by his Pan-Islamic propaganda, which it was thought was affecting the loyalty of the Indian Mohammedans. Ideas, therefore, of Arab independence were agreeable to the official view, and Sir Alfred Lyall reported well of mine to Lytton, so well that there was a plan half agreed to between us that I should return the following winter to Nejd and should be the bearer of a complimentary message from the Viceroy to Ibn Rashid. I am glad now, with my better knowledge of the ways of the Indian Government, that this proposal led to no practical result. I see plainly that it would have placed me in a false position, and that with the best will in the world to help the Arabs and serve the cause of freedom I might have made myself unconsciously the instrument of a policy tending to their subjugation. It is one of the evils of the English Imperial system that it cannot meddle anywhere among free people, even with quite innocent intentions, without in the end doing evil. There are too many selfish interests always at work not to turn the best beginnings into ill endings.

These matters, however, were not the only ones I discussed with Lytton and his subordinates. Sir John Strachey, his finance minister, put me through a course of instruction on Indian finance and Indian economics, the methods of dealing with famines, the land revenue, the currency, the salt tax, and the other large questions then under discussion—Strachey being the chief official advocate of what was called the forward policy in public expenditure—and with the unexpected result that my faith, up to that moment strong in the honesty of the Indian Government, as the faithful guardian of native interests, was rudely shaken. The following extracts from letters written by me at the time from Simla will show how this short glimpse of India at headquarters was affecting me: "I am disappointed," I wrote, "with India, which seems just as ill-governed as the rest of Asia, only with good intentions instead of bad ones or none at all. There is just the same heavy taxation, government by foreign officials, and waste of money one sees in Turkey, only, let us hope, the officials are fools instead of knaves. The result is the same, and I don't see much difference between making the starving Hindoos pay for a cathedral at Calcutta and taxing Bulgarians for a palace on the Bosphorus. Want eats up these great Empires in their centralized governments, and the only way to make them prosper would be to split them up and let the pieces govern themselves." Also to another friend, Harry Brand, Radical Member of Parliament, now Lord Hampden, "The natives, as they call them, are a race of slaves, frightened, unhappy, and terribly thin. Though a good Conservative and a member of the Carlton Club I own to being shocked at the Egyptian bondage in which they are held, and my faith in British institutions and the blessings of British rule have received a severe blow. I have been studying the mysteries of Indian finance under the 'best masters,' Government secretaries, commissioners, and the rest, and have come to the conclusion that if we go on developing the country at the present rate the inhabitants will have, sooner or later, to resort to cannibalism, for there will be nothing but each other left to eat. I do not clearly understand why we English take their money from these starving Hindoos to make railroads for them which they don't want, and turnpike roads and jails and lunatic asylums and memorial buildings to Sir Bartle Frere, and why we insist upon their feeding out of their wretched handfulls of rice immense armies of policemen and magistrates and engineers. They want none of these things, and they want their rice very badly, as anybody can see by looking at their ribs. As to the debt they have been saddled with, I think it would be honester to repudiate it, at least as a Debt on India. I never could see the moral obligation governments acknowledge of taxing people for the debts they, and not the people, have incurred. All public debts, even in a self-governing country, are more or less dishonest, but in a foreign despotism like India they are a mere swindle."

On the whole, this brief visit to India at headquarters had considerable influence with me in the shaping of my ideas on the larger questions of Imperial policy, and giving them the direction they afterwards took. I still believed, but with failing faith, in the good intentions, if no longer in the good results, of our Eastern rule, and I thought it could be improved and that the people at home would insist upon its being improved if they only knew.

One of my last recollections of my two months' stay with Lytton at Peterhoff, as the Viceregal residence was then called at Simla, was of a dinner at which I sat next to Cavagnari the evening before he set out on his fatal mission to Kabul. He was an interesting man, the grandson, so he told me, of a Venetian merchant who, when the French Republican army occupied Venice, lent a large sum of money to Bonaparte, which was never repaid. The Emperor, however, rewarded him by making his son his private secretary, who became a devoted adherent of the Imperial family. Lewis Napoleon Cavagnari, the grandson, was also a strong Bonapartist, and believed himself, on account of his name, to have before him a very high destiny. He had faith in his "star," and I can testify that in his talk to me that night—and it was long and intimate—the last thing he seemed to think of was failure or danger in his mission. Yet only a few days before he must have had an admonition in the tragic news, of which we also talked, of the Prince Imperial's death in South Africa. When we parted it was with an engagement on my part and on my wife's that we would go in the autumn to visit him at Kabul. "You must not come, however," he said, "before the autumn, because I shall not have got the Residency comfortable or fit to receive ladies." Of any more dangerous reason he gave us no kind of hint.

Another acquaintance at that time with whom a tragic history is connected was Colley, then Lytton's military secretary, who the year following was to die on Majuba Hill. Lytton had the highest possible opinion of his military talents, and between them they had in large measure directed the Afghan campaign from Simla. His fault was, I think, too great self-confidence and too much ambition. He occupied Majuba because he could not bear to let the campaign end without gaining some personal success. Melgund again, who is now Lord Minto, Pole-Carew, and Brabazon, Lytton's aides-de-camp, were all three, with Lord Ralph Kerr, among our friends of that time, and Plowden and Batten, the husbands of their two fair wives. We made the voyage back from Bombay in Melgund's company and that of Major Jack Napier, leaving India on the 12th of July in full monsoon and arriving at Suez on the 25th, and on the same day by train to Alexandria.

I think it was at Aden, as we passed it to the Red Sea, that we learned the great news of the day in Egypt, the deposition of the Khedive Ismaïl, a subject to us of great rejoicing, and no sooner had we arrived at Alexandria than I learned the full details of his share in the affair from that other intimate friend of my diplomatic days, Frank Lascelles, whom I found acting Consul-General at the British Agency. What he told me does not differ much from the account of it officially published, and I need not repeat it here. What, however, is not generally known is the part played in it by the Rothschilds, which Lascelles did not at that time know but which I heard later from Wilson. Wilson, indeed, was able to boast that through these he had had his full revenge. On his return, he told me, from Egypt, crestfallen and abandoned by his own Government, he had gone straight to the Rothschilds at Paris and had represented to them the danger their money was running from the turn affairs had taken at Cairo and Alexandria. The Khedive intended to repudiate his whole debt and to shelter himself in doing so by proclaiming Constitutional government in Egypt. If they did not prevent this, all would be lost. He thus succeeded in alarming the Rothschilds and in getting them to use the immense political influence they possessed in favour of active intervention. At first, however, they had pulled the strings both at Downing Street and on the Quai d'Orsay in vain. The English Government was no longer in an intervening mood, trouble having broken out for them in South Africa; and at Paris, too, there was an equal unwillingness. In despair for their millions the Rothschilds then made supplication at Berlin to Bismarck, who ever since his Frankfort days had extended a certain contemptuous protection to the great Hebrew house, and not in vain. The French and English Governments were given to understand by the then all-powerful Chancellor that if they were unable to intervene effectively in Egypt in the bond-holders' interests the German Government would make their cause its own. This settled the matter, and it was agreed that, as the least violent form of intervention, the Sultan should be applied to to depose his too recalcitrant vassal. To the last moment Ismaïl refused to believe that the Porte, on which he had lavished so many millions and was still appealing cash in hand—for he had hidden treasures—would desert him. The pressure from Europe was too great. Wilson claims to have had the question of Ismaïl's successor submitted to him as between Halim, whom the Sultan much preferred, and Tewfik, and to have decided in favor of the latter as being known to him to be of weak character and so the more convenient political instrument. But be that as it may, the fatal telegram was despatched conveying to Ismaïl the news of his fall, and that his Viceregal functions had passed away from him to his son. It had been Lascelles' disagreeable duty to convey the news to the old tyrant of eighteen irresponsible and ruinous years. True to his rapacious habit, his last act had been to deplete the treasury of its current account and to gather together all the valuables he could anywhere lay hands on, and so retire to his yacht, the "Mahroussa," with a final spoil of his Egyptian subjects amounting, it is said, to three millions sterling. Nobody had cared to hinder him or inquire, or bid him stay even for an hour.

[CHAPTER IV]
ENGLISH POLITICS IN 1880

Cavagnari's tragical death at Kabul, which took place before the summer of 1879 was over, a disaster which involved Lytton in a new war and endless political trouble, effectually ended any projects we had made of fresh travel for that year, either in Afghanistan or Arabia. I spent, therefore, a full twelve months in England, the busiest as yet in some ways of my life. Up to that date, though I was now in my fortieth year, I had not only taken no public part in politics, but I had never so much as made a speech to an audience or written an article for a review, or a letter to a newspaper. Constitutionally shy in early life I had shrunk from publicity in any shape, and the diplomatic training I had had had only aggravated my repugnance to being en évidence. Diplomacy, whether it has or has not anything to hide, always affects secrecy and entertains a distrust of public speaking and an extreme jealousy of the indiscretions of the Press. Now, however, having persuaded myself that I had a mission in the Oriental world, however vague and ill defined, I began to talk and write, and even overcame my timidity to the extent of appearing once or twice upon a platform. The first occasion on which I ever thus spoke was at a meeting of the British Association at Sheffield on the 22nd of August, to which I was invited as a distinguished traveller in the company of M. Serpa Pinto, M. de Brazza, and Captain Cameron, all of African fame, and where I opposed Cameron's advocacy of a Euphrates Valley Railroad. I was able to speak on this matter with more authority than he, for, though he had gone out with much beating of drums the year before to explore the route, he had turned back from the difficult part of it—that which lay between Bagdad and Bushire—while we had made the whole route from sea to sea; and I followed up my opposition in an article on the same subject, the first I ever wrote, in the "Fortnightly Review." John Morley was at that time editor of the "Fortnightly," and I had an introduction to him from Lytton, and managed to interest him in my Eastern ideas. Both these little ventures with speech and pen brought me credit and encouraged me to do more in the direction of what was now my propaganda. I was busy too with poetry; and, again, I had my wife's book of travels, "A Pilgrimage to Nejd," to arrange and edit. The multiplied work occupied me fully all the winter.

With home politics I troubled myself not at all, though it was a time of crisis, and Gladstone, with the General Election of 1880 at hand, was in the full fervour of his Midlothian preaching. My sympathies, as far as England was concerned, were still rather with the Tories, and on Oriental questions I looked upon Gladstone, little as I loved the Turks, as an ignoramus and fanatic. My personal friends, with the exception of two or three, Harry Brand and Eddy Hamilton, were all Tories, and my love for Lytton covered in my eyes the worst of Disraeli's Imperial sins. I clung to the thought that England in the East might yet, through the Cyprus Convention properly interpreted, be made an instrument for good, and I was swayed backwards and forwards in regard to her Imperial position by opposing hopes and fears. It was not till I had cleared my thoughts by putting them into print that I gradually came to any settled plan. One great pre-occupation, too, I had that year in the establishment of my stud of Arab horses at Crabbet, about which I was in constant correspondence with the world of sport, including a public one with the Jockey Club. Curiously enough, it was in connection with my views on horseflesh that I first came into epistolary communication with Mr. Gladstone. His well-known hobby about ancient Greece had made him curious to learn my opinion about the horses of antiquity, and especially the probable breeding of those of Greece and Troy; and a message was conveyed to me through Mr. Knowles, the editor of the "Nineteenth Century Review," asking a memorandum on their genealogy. This, and the accident of his naming Edward Hamilton, with whom I was intimate, his private secretary when he took office in April in succession to Disraeli, were the links which led to our correspondence later on Egyptian affairs.

A few extracts from a fragmentary journal I began to keep in 1880 will show the chaos of ideas, literary, social, and political in which during that year, I lived. The extracts are only such as have some relation to Eastern affairs, and I find them embedded in a mass of notes recording events of private and ephemeral interest no longer of any value. The first gives a picture of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, for so many years our Ambassador at Constantinople, and who was now living in retirement and extreme old age with his two daughters on the borders of Kent and Sussex:

"March, 1880.—A visit to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe at Frant. Lord Stratford has given me a paper on reforms for Turkey, which he is thinking of sending to the 'Times,' and I read it in bed. It is an old man's work, rambling and vague, with hardly an occasional touch of vigour. Old men should write nothing but their recollections, and Lord S. is ninety-four. A wonderful old man, nevertheless, with a countenance of extreme benignity, a complexion of milk and rose leaves, clear blue eyes, and hair as white as snow. Though rather deaf, he still talks well. I wrote him in return a memorandum with my ideas for Asiatic Turkey, and later spent the morning with him listening to his old-world recollections. He was Chargé d'Affaires at Constantinople when Byron passed through on his Childe Harold journey, and had ridden with him every day for six weeks. Byron had been very agreeable, and there was nothing at that time scabreux in his conversation. He had also (before that) in 1805 met him at Lord's Cricket Ground at the Eton and Harrow match, both of them playing in the elevens on opposite sides. Byron played cricket 'as well as could be expected considering his infirmity.' He, Lord S., had never been willing to think there had ever been anything really wrong between B. and Lady Caroline Lamb. The impression Lord S. gives me is one of extreme kindness, gentleness, and benignity, quite foreign to his reputation. I had rather sit listening to these old-world confessions than to the talk of the prettiest woman in London."

"March 16.—Breakfasted with Rivers Wilson and discussed Colonel Gordon's character. All the world is agreed about his being a very wonderful man. He has ruled the Soudan for four years single-handed, and has repressed the slave trade completely. Now he comes home to England and nothing is done for him. Neither Lord Beaconsfield nor any of the Ministers will so much as see him. He made a mistake at starting (in his relations with them). Passing through Paris (on his way home) he called on Lord Lyons (at the Embassy), and begged him to see to the appointment of a European successor to himself in the Soudan, and in the course of conversation held out the threat that, if the English Government would not do this, he would go to the French Government. Whereupon a correspondence ensued with Lord Lyons, in which Gordon wrote a last very intemperate letter ending in these words: 'I have one comfort in thinking that in ten or fifteen years' time it will matter little to either of us. A black box, six feet six by three feet wide, will then contain all that is left of Ambassador, or Cabinet Minister, or of your humble and obedient servant.' This has stamped him (in official eyes) as a madman. Now he has left Europe, shaking the dust off his feet, for Zanzibar."

This little anecdote is very characteristic of Gordon and is in harmony with much of his correspondence, four years later, with Sir Evelyn Baring. Our officials always detested him, for he habitually violated the rules of their diplomacy and the conventions of their official intercourse. Some thought him mad, others that he drank, and others again that he was a religious fanatic who, when he was in doubt between two courses, consulted his Bible for an oracle, or as a last solution "spun a coin." Not one of them understood or trusted him. At the moment of which I am writing, the early spring of 1880, he was very angry with the English Government for the part it had taken in deposing Ismaïl. Gordon for some reason or other liked Ismaïl, and hated his successor Tewfik, and as soon as he learned at Khartoum what had happened, he had thrown up his Governorship, and was now especially angry because a Turkish pasha, and not a European, had been appointed in his place. Gordon was a man of genius, with many noble qualities, but he was also a bundle of contradictions, and the officials were probably right when they looked upon him as not being at all times quite of a sound mind. This, as will be seen, was the official opinion even at the very moment of his being charged at the Foreign Office with his last mission to Khartoum.

The following, too, of the same date, 16th March, is interesting: "Called on Cardinal Manning. Our conversation was on politics. He asked me which way I should vote at the Elections. I said, 'I should vote only on one consideration, a £5 note,' Cardinal: 'You mean you will not vote at all?' I: 'I can get up no interest in these things. I look upon European civilization as doomed to perish, and all politics as an expedient which cannot materially delay or hasten the end.' Cardinal: 'I take the same view, though probably on different grounds. Europe is rejecting Christianity, and with it the reign of moral law. The reign of force is now beginning again, as in the earliest ages, and bloodshed and ruin must be the result. Perhaps on the ruins the Church may again build up something new.' Talking of Asia, he said that Ralph Kerr had told him that the inhabitants of India attributed the mildness of our rule to fear. They respect the Russians because they govern by military law. I: 'The Russians are Asiatics. They govern in the Asiatic way—by fraud if possible—if not, by force. This Asiatics understand.' Cardinal: 'The Russians, as you say, are Asiatics; and I will tell you more: their Nihilists are Buddhists. Nihilism is a product not of the West, but of the East.'"

The General Elections, it must be remembered, of 1880 were fought to a very large extent on questions of Eastern policy. Gladstone in his Midlothian campaign had attacked with tremendous violence the whole of Disraeli's scheme of imperial expansion, and had denounced as grossly immoral his intervention at Constantinople and Berlin in favour of the Turks, his acquisition of Cyprus, his purchase of the Suez Canal shares, and his aggression on Egypt—as also Lytton's two Afghan campaigns and the Boer War still raging in South Africa. With regard to Egypt, Gladstone had as long before as the year 1877 made known his views in print, and in an article in the August number of the "Nineteenth Century Review" of that year, "Aggression on Egypt and Freedom in the East," had declared himself in the clearest and strongest terms opposed to the undertaking by England of any form of responsibility on the Nile. This article is so remarkable and so wonderfully prescient of evils he was himself destined to inflict upon Egypt that it deserves quoting. He objects in it to such aggression on various grounds: first, as increasing England's burden of Eastern rule, already too great; secondly, because extensions of imperial rule can only be effected by immoral means; thirdly, as regarded Egypt, that the pretence of protecting the route to India by occupying the Nile Valley was a false one, the route by the Cape of Good Hope being England's true line of communication; and, fourthly, because intervention of any kind, whether on the Suez Canal or at Cairo, must inevitably lead to farther and farther adventures in Africa. "Our first site in Egypt," he writes, "be it by larceny or be it by emption, will be the almost certain egg of a North African Empire that will grow and grow till another Victoria and another Albert, titles of the lake sources of the White Nile, will come within our borders, and till we finally join hands across the Equator with Natal and Cape Town, to say nothing of the Transvaal and the Orange River on the south or of Abyssinia or Zanzibar to be swallowed by way of viaticum on our journey—and then, with a great empire in each of the four quarters of the world ... we may be territorially content but less than ever at our ease." He had made also a plea for the continuation of Mohammedan self-government at Cairo. "The susceptibilities which we might offend in Egypt," he says, "are rational and just. For very many centuries she has been inhabited by a Mohammedan community. That community has always been governed by Mohammedan influences and powers. During a portion of the period it had Sultans of its own. Of late, while politically attached to Constantinople, it has been practically governed from within, a happy incident in the condition of any country and one which we should be slow to change. The grievances of the people are indeed great, but there is no proof whatever that they are incurable. Mohammedanism now appears in the light of experience to be radically incapable of establishing a good or tolerable government over civilized and Christian races; but what proof have we that in the case of a Mohammedan community, where there are no adverse complications of blood or religion, or tradition or speech, the ends of political society, as they understand them, may not be passably obtained." Lastly, he had foreseen the quarrel which an attempt by England to seize Egypt would create with France: "My belief is that the day which witnesses our occupation of Egypt will bid a long farewell to all cordiality of political relations between France and England. There might be no immediate quarrel, no exterior manifestation, but a silent, rankling grudge there would be like the now extinguished grudge of America during the Civil War, which awaited the opportunity of some embarrassment on our side and on hers of returning peace and leisure from weightier matters. Nations have long memories." He had ended his article by a solemn warning and an appeal to the hand of the Most High to confound the intrigues of Cabinets, and secure the great emancipation of the East. "No such deliverance," he concludes, "has for centuries blessed the earth. We of this country (England) may feel with grief and pain that we have done nothing to promote it. Whatever happens, may nothing still worse than this lie at our door. Let us hope ... that to abdicate duty we may not have to add a chapter of perpetrated wrong."

With these noble declarations, reiterated in a score of speeches during the Election campaign of 1880, I could not but be in sympathy, had it been possible to take them as quite sincere or as representing a policy intended by the Liberal Party to be carried out when they should be in office. But Gladstone did not at that time inspire me with any confidence, and between Whigs and Tories there seemed to me to be but little difference.

"March 20.—John Pollen (then private secretary to Lord Ripon) dined with us. We talked of the Elections and agreed there was not much to choose between Whigs and Tories. I shall not vote. Though Lord Salisbury's policy is less contemptible than Lord Granville's or Gladstone's, it is coquetting too much with the Germans to please me. To bring Germany down to Constantinople would be a greater misfortune than anything Russia can accomplish."

"April 6.—Paris (the Elections being over and having resulted in a large Liberal majority). Godfrey Webb and I breakfasted with Bitters (my cousin Francis Gore Currie), and I then went to the Embassy. Sheffield (Lord Lyon's private secretary) very important about the new Liberal Government—what he said to Hartington, and what Granville said to him. Though I abstain from politics, I confess I think the Gladstonian triumph a great misfortune. They are so strong now that we shall have all sorts of experiments played with our British Constitution. The game laws, the land laws, and all the palladiums will be dismantled. Our policy in Asia will suffer. The Whigs know nothing of the East and will be afraid to reverse the Tory policy, and afraid to carry it logically out. They will try to reform Turkey, and, finding it impossible, will lose their temper and very likely drift into a war. Personally the change is annoying to me, as now Lytton will resign with the Ministry and we shall be baulked of our Indian visit next winter. But all these things are trifles in the march of history."

"April 9.—(Still at Paris.) A letter from Anne full of politics.... 'Hartington is to be Premier, Goschen Admiralty, and Gladstone finance ... nothing in the foreign policy will be changed! Cyprus kept, Russia thwarted, and Turkey administered from Gallipoli.... Lord Ripon does not know his own place, if any. I hear Mme. de Novikoff[5] still described as the Egeria of Gladstone.'... Dined with Adams (first secretary of the Paris Embassy) and met there Rivers Wilson, who goes to-morrow to Egypt with Dicey, and Arthur Sullivan the composer—all pleasant company." (This was Wilson's final mission in which he arranged the law of liquidation.)

"April 26.—Home to England, where Gladstone is the talk of the hour. He has taken office (as Prime Minister) and has surrounded himself with ineptitudes, Childers, Bright, Granville! Hartington, who is a good second-rate man, takes the India Office and Ripon goes to India. This last arrangement is a secret."

Lord Ripon's appointment to India as Viceroy was the only quite sincere attempt made in foreign policy by Gladstone to carry out in office what he had preached when in opposition. Ripon was a thoroughly honest man, of no very brilliant parts but straightforward and in earnest. He took seriously the mission with which he was entrusted by the new Government of making and keeping the peace on the Indian frontiers, and of inaugurating a new policy having for its object to carry out the Queen's proclamation of self-government among the natives. To the astonishment, and indeed scandal, of the official world, he took with him as his private secretary Gordon, whom all looked upon as mad—than which no better proof could have been given of his bona fides towards Native India. Gordon, however, was not of the stuff of which private secretaries, even with a chief like Ripon, are made, and he had hardly landed at Bombay before he resigned. I do not think that Ripon was in fault in this, but rather Gordon's restless chafing against all rules and conventions. I shall have later to describe Ripon's viceroyalty when I come to my second Indian journey in 1884. Now it will be enough to say that, if it achieved comparatively little, it was through the pusillanimity of the Ministry at home rather than his own. He valiantly went on in the course traced out for him at the start, but like boys who sometimes in a race, to make a fool of their companion who is in front of them, hang back and stop, he found out to his confusion after a while that he had been running alone and that the Ministers who had changed their minds without letting him know had long been laughing at him for his persistence. It must have been a bitter moment for him when he, too, had to give in. The other appointments made were all, as far as the highest offices went, given by Gladstone to the Whigs. Lord Granville—the matter which interested me most—got the Foreign Office, an amiable old nobleman with a good knowledge of French, but very deaf and very idle, whose diplomacy was of the old procrastinating school of never doing today what could possibly be put off till to-morrow, or, as he himself was fond of putting it, of "dawdling matters out" and leaving them to right themselves alone. Of such a Minister nothing in the way of a new policy could be expected, and none was attempted either in Turkey, or Egypt, or elsewhere. The Cyprus Convention was neither repudiated nor turned to account for any good purpose, and beyond a little sham pressure put upon the Sultan in the matter of Montenegro and the Greek frontier, things were left precisely as they were. The only change made was that Layard, the author of the Convention, was recalled from Constantinople and Goschen appointed in his place, the same Goschen who had made the leonine arrangement for the bondholders in Egypt three years before, his own family firm of Göschen and Frühling being one of them. The only act of the new Foreign Secretary which showed that he remembered Mr. Gladstone's denunciations of the Turks was that, in order to prove that Gladstone had been right and Disraeli and Salisbury wrong about them, he in defiance of the ordinary rule in such matters at the Foreign Office published a secret despatch of Layard's which contradicted everything the Ambassador had written about the situation at Constantinople in his public despatches. In this unfortunate document he had laid bare the secret vices and weaknesses of the Sultan Abdul Hamid, his personal cowardice especially being insisted on and emphasized with details then unknown to the world, but now notorious, of his system of spy-government. Its publication was a gross act of treachery to Layard, and was, moreover, an act of folly from the effects of which our diplomacy at Constantinople has not yet recovered; Layard had been, so to say, Abdul Hamid's bosom friend and had received from him favours of a kind not usually accorded to European Envoys. The Sultan had shown himself to Layard as to a comrade on whom he could rely, and the disclosure of what he considered Layard's treachery alienated for ever his goodwill from England.

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the unpromising position at the Foreign Office, I was resolved in the interests of my propaganda to make a bid for sympathy for my plans with the new Prime Minister. I was encouraged to this by the appointment he had made on taking office of one of my most intimate friends, Eddy Hamilton (now Sir Edward Hamilton, K.C.B.), to be his private secretary, from whom I learned that, whatever might be the public exigencies of the moment abroad, Mr. Gladstone's sympathies with Oriental liberty were no whit abated. From Hamilton I had no secrets as to my own views and plans, and all that he thought necessary to win his master to them was that I should give them a wider publicity in print. There were other channels, too, through which it was judged that Gladstone might be influenced, and some of these are referred to in my journal.

"June 12.—Hamilton Aidé took me to call upon Mrs. L, who lives in a big house in M ... Square, a plump, good-natured Irishwoman of fifty, impulsive, talkative, but without trace either of beauty or anything else. She is one of Gladstone's Egerias, and our visit was partly diplomatic, as I want to indoctrinate her with my Arabian ideas, and through her the Prime Minister. She is already enthusiastic about such Arabs as she has seen, and affects a serious interest in the East. She read us with much spirit a drama she had been writing about Herod, Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar—sad stuff, which she assured us Gladstone admired exceedingly.

"Rolland, John Pollen and Lawrence Oliphant to dinner. The last a very attractive man. He has just come back from Constantinople, where he has been trying to get a concession from the Sultan for lands beyond Jordan to be colonized by the children of Israel."

"June 22.—The Plowdens to dinner and Eddy Hamilton, who is now Gladstone's private secretary. Plowden goes to Bagdad to-morrow as Resident. I indoctrinated him and Eddy on the Eastern question."

"June 26.—Lord Calthorpe, Percy Wyndham, and Captain Levitt joined us at Crabbet, and we had a show of horses. Lord C. tells me he has shown my letter about Arab horse-racing to several members of the Jockey Club, and he will bring the matter forward at one of the club meetings next month; so that it is to be hoped we shall succeed. If I can introduce a pure Arabian breed of horses into England and help to see Arabia free of the Turks, I shall not have quite lived in vain. My fourth letter to the 'Spectator' (on the politics of Central Arabia) has appeared to-day, and my article in the 'Fortnightly' ('The Sultan's Heirs in Asia') is advertised.... Later to the Admiralty, where Lord Northbrook complimented me on my letters (they were the first I had ever written to a newspaper). Sir Garnet Wolseley was there, a brisk little jerky man, whom it is difficult to accept as a great general. I reminded him of our visit to Cyprus. He said, 'I believe Lady Anne is writing a book.' 'Yes, but we have said nothing about Cyprus in it.' 'Oh, you didn't stay long enough.' 'We thought it best to say nothing.'"

The article here spoken of, "The Sultan's Heirs in Asia," was, as I have said, a bid for Gladstone's serious attention to my ideas, and through Hamilton's help, who brought it under his notice, it was completely successful, though characteristically the feature of it which interested him most was that which has proved least politically practical, and was to me the least important, namely, the future of the Armenian provinces as an independent state. The idea I propounded was, that in the same way as a large portion of European Turkey had been given its independence, so in the decline of the Ottoman Empire the Asiatic provinces should also be encouraged to form themselves into independent states, according to their prevailing nationalities; and I appealed by name to Mr. Gladstone to make good his words, so freely and so recently uttered in favour of Eastern liberty, by making use of the instrument devised by his predecessors in office, the Cyprus Convention, not for the selfish purposes of English imperialism, but for the good of the peoples of the East. Its publication in the July number of the "Fortnightly" led to my being invited to Downing Street, where I had an opportunity of pressing my views personally on the Prime Minister. It will be seen that I was not on that first occasion much impressed by him; but I was encouraged to develop my ideas, and from that time my opinion, conveyed to him generally through Hamilton, was of some account with Gladstone in regard to Eastern affairs.

"June 27.—Called on A. with whom I found Queensberry. He began at once to expound to us his religious doctrines, talking in an excited, earnest way. These doctrines seem to me mere Comtism. There is some sort of Supreme Being, not a personal God, and a conscience by which man is guided in his search of perfection. The principle doctrine, 'faith in humanity,' and the principal duty, 'the perfectioning of body and soul,' especially body. The Marquess is not a very lucid expounder, and proposed to recite us a poem instead—a poem he had written. While we were expecting this in came Philip Currie and a little old man with a long nose and very black eyes, Malkum Khan, the Persian Ambassador. These sat down and listened while Queensberry recited. The poem was in blank verse, vague, doctrinal, fantastic, beginning with the Matterhorn and going on to Humanity. When he had finished the Oriental spoke. He said, 'Perhaps it would interest you to hear the story of a religion which was founded some years ago in Persia, and of which I was at one time the head. It will exemplify the manner in which religions are produced, and you will see that the doctrine of Humanity is one at least as congenial to Asia as to Europe. Europe, indeed, is incapable of inventing a real religion, one which shall take possession of the souls of men; as incapable as Asia is of inventing a system of politics. The mind of Asia is speculative, of Europe practical. In Persia we every day produce "new Christs." We have "Sons of God" in every village, martyrs for their faith in every town. I have myself seen hundreds of Babis suffer death and torture for their belief in a prophet whose doctrines were identical with those of Jesus Christ, and who, like Him, was crucified. Christianity is but one of these hundred Asiatic preachings, brought into notice through its adoption by the Greek mind and given a logical form and a material complexion. If it had remained an Asiatic faith it would long ago have perished, as a hundred moral and mystic teachings have perished before and after it. When I was a young man I, too, as I told you, founded a religion which at one time numbered 30,000 devotees. I was born an Armenian Christian, but I was brought up among Mohammedans, and my tone of thought is theirs. I was foster-brother to the Shah and when he came to the throne he made me his Prime Minister. At the age of twenty I was practically despotic in Persia. I saw the abuses of government, the decline of material prosperity in the country, and I was bitten with the idea of reform. I went to Europe and studied there the religious, social, and political systems of the West. I learned the spirit of the various sects of Christendom, and the organization of the secret societies and freemasonries, and I conceived a plan which should incorporate the political wisdom of Europe with the religious wisdom of Asia. I knew that it was useless to attempt a remodelling of Persia in European forms, and I was determined to clothe my material reformation in a garb which my people would understand, the garb of religion. I therefore, on my return, called together the chief persons of Teheran, my friends, and spoke to them in private of the need which Islam had of purer doctrine. I appealed to their moral dignity and pride of birth. There are in Persian two words, each signifying Man—insan, from the Arabic, and adhem (Adam), more strictly Persian in derivation. The second signifies Man as a genus, a particular kind of animal—the first man as an intellectual and distinguished being (the homo and vir of Latin). You all, I said, pride yourselves that you are more than adhem; you are also insan. And it is to enable you to justify that pretension that I will advise you to do this and that. They all found my reasoning good, and in a short time I had got together 30,000 followers. Under the name of a Reformation of Islam I thus introduced what material reforms I could. To my doctrine is due the telegraph, the reorganization of the administrative departments, and many another attempted improvement since gone to ruin. I had, however, no intention at the outset of founding a religion. The character of saint and prophet was forced on me by my followers. They gave me the title of "Holy Ghost," and the Shah that of "Reformer of Islam." I wrote a book, a bible of my creed, and enthusiasts maintained that I worked miracles. At last the Shah was alarmed at my power, which in truth had become superior to his own. He sought, in spite of our old friendship, to kill me, and my followers sought to kill him. For two months we both lived in great fear of assassination, and then we came to an explanation. I loved and revered the Shah, and I asked permission to travel. My followers took leave of me with tears, even the Mollahs kissing my feet. I went to Constantinople, thinking to get permission from the Sultan to reside at Bagdad, and I in fact went there and gained new converts from among the resident Persian and Bagdad Shiahs. But the Turks deceived me, and I had to leave my work unfinished. My followers in Persia urged me to return, but I was deterred through several motives; first, I feared to find my death for a religion in which I did not believe, secondly, my health broke down, and, thirdly, I had married a wife. I wrote to the Shah, who replied, offering me any appointment I would, so I would remain abroad; and I accepted the position of Ambassador-General to all the Courts of Europe.' It was strange to hear this little old man, in European clothes and talking very good French, recounting a tale so purely Oriental. I walked home with him afterwards (he lived on the other side of Hyde Park), and he detailed to me his ideas about the East and West, both of which he knows, and knows thoroughly. I left him with the impression that he was the most remarkable man I had ever met, and more convinced than ever of the superior intelligence of the Eastern mind. Who is there in Europe that could have made one thus feel like a child?"

This chance meeting, at a fine lady's house in Belgravia in the middle of the London season, affected me profoundly, and to a certain extent revolutionized my ideas. I trace to it, and to other talks which I had later with this singular personage, the conviction which rapidly overcame me that in all my thought of freeing and reforming the East I had begun at the wrong end, and that, if I was to effect anything either for the Arabs or for any other of the Moslem peoples subject to the Turks, I must first make myself thoroughly acquainted with their religious ideas. As yet I had passed among them, in spite of my political sympathy, as a stranger to their more serious thought; without religious prejudice myself of the ordinary Christian kind, I had learned to respect Islam, but I did not comprehend it, nor had I ever discussed its teachings with any one learned in its law or conversant with its modern thought. I saw at once the weakness, nay the absurdity of my position, and I resolved before I went any farther to devote the following winter to a study of at least the main features of the Mohammedan doctrines as they affected Mohammedan politics. With this view I made my plans for the winter. My thought was to go to Jeddah at or about the time of the pilgrimage, and there inform myself as I best could, and then take any occasion that might offer for further action. I wished to penetrate once more into Arabia, if possible through Hejaz, or perhaps Yemen to Nejd. I had an idea that among the Wahhabis I might find a teacher who would give me the Arabian as opposed to the Ottoman view of Islam, and that I might devise with him a movement of reform in which I should suggest the political, he the religious elements. It was a sufficiently wild idea, but I entertained it seriously at the time, and the confession of having done so will explain to Egyptian readers how it came about that I took the line I did at Cairo a year later.

I was influenced, too, at that time in London by another learned Oriental, one Sabunji, whose acquaintance I had made in the character of Arabic teacher. He, too, like Malkum Khan, was of Christian origin, a member of one of the Catholic sects of Syria, and he had even taken priest's orders and served the Congregation of the Propaganda at Rome; but he had latterly thrown off the cassock and, like the Ambassador, was much more in sympathy with Islam than with his own faith. As an Arabic scholar he was very remarkable, and he had a wide acquaintance with the questions, half political, half religious, which were being discussed just then among Mohammedans. He had done the main work for the late Dr. Badger in compiling the Arabic-English Dictionary which goes by Dr. Badger's name, and in 1880 was carrying on in London an Arabic newspaper called "El Nakhleh," the Bee, in which religious reform was preached to Mohammedans once a month, on the most advanced lines of modern thought. There was a mystery about the financing of this little journal, and the motives prompting its issue, which I never quite fathomed. His own account of it was that his chief patron was the Sultan of Zanzibar, a very enlightened and liberal-minded ruler. But I was never quite satisfied with this explanation, and I have since had reason to believe that the funds to support it, and the suggestion of its politics came, in part at least, from the ex-Khedive Ismaïl. Ismaïl was at that time very angry with the Sultan for his betrayal of him to Europe, and the "Bee" was violent against Abdul Hamid, and denounced him especially as an usurper of the title of Emir el Mumenin and Caliph. I do not well remember whether it was from this Sabunji or from Malkum Khan that I first came to understand the historical aspect of the caliphal question and its modern aspects, but, opposed as I was to Ottoman rule, it struck me at once as one of high importance to the kind of reform I was beginning now to look for. There is notice in my journal of my having sent in a memorandum to Mr. Gladstone on the subject, and I have a letter from Hamilton, showing that the idea was considered one of importance by members of the Cabinet and generally in Downing Street.

"July 3.—A tea party at A.'s, a 'collection of mystics,' old Rolland, Dunraven, and Oliphant. The two latter and I had a conference in a back room which resulted in our agreeing to act in common on the Eastern question, so as to influence public opinion in England. We are to have a preliminary meeting at Dunraven's on Thursday."

"July 8.—Called on Percy Wyndham and converted him to my political creed. Also received a visit on the same subject from Mr. Boyce, M. P. Dined with Dunraven, Oliphant, Otway, Percy Wyndham, Harry Brand, and Whittaker, editor of the 'Levant Herald,' at Limmer's Hotel, to arrange a course of action with a view to influencing public opinion in England respecting Asia. Nothing more definite settled than the formation of a committee for receiving news. Later to Bryce's, where I met one Robertson Smith, who has been lately in the Hejaz." (This was the well-known professor.)

"July 13.—Went to a party at Mrs. Gladstone's. We arrived early, before other people had come, and I had twenty minutes' conversation with the great man. I detailed to him my ideas about the regeneration of the East, in which he seemed to take an interest, as far as a man can who is totally ignorant of the A B C of a question. His remarks struck me as the reverse of profound, and his questions contrasted unfavourably with those put to me three years ago by Lord Salisbury. A British steamer had been fired on by some Arabs on the Tigris, and he began by remarking that he feared this fact showed a marked antagonism towards England on the part of Arabia. The state of the Ottoman Empire he considered most critical. Probably the East had never been in a more critical state than now. If the Treaty of San Stefano had been carried out Turkey could hardly have been more critically situated than she was. I succeeded however, I think, in grafting him with two ideas, one that the Caliphate was not necessarily vested in the House of Othman, the other that Midhat Pasha was a fool. He has evidently made up his mind about nothing, and will let himself drift on till the smash comes."

"July 15.—Attended a meeting of Philo-Asiatics. In the afternoon to Aldermaston, a fine park with a tiresome modern house; Sir Henry Layard doing the honours. I had a great prejudice against him, but find him agreeable and without pretension, considering his position. He talks well, especially of his travels, and he really understands the East, reminding me a little of Skene and Rolland, both fellow travellers of his in old days.... Layard's memoirs would be the most interesting of any man's of the present century. His rise from the position of a wandering outcast among the Kurds, almost himself an outlaw, to that of British Ambassador to the Porte, contains all the romance of human life."

"July 17.—An interview with Sir Charles Dilke (Under-Secretary of State) at the Foreign Office. I explained to him my idea of going to Nejd this autumn with Abdallah Ibn Saoud, and to my surprise he seemed to acquiesce. Although our conversation was not a long one, it left me with the impression of Dilke being a superior man. His questions were plain and to the point, and, once understood, he wrote the draft of a despatch to Goschen at Constantinople, referring me for further details to Tenterden (the permanent Head of the Foreign Office), and I am now full of the notion of going to Arabia and heading a movement for the restoration of the Arabian Caliphate. People have been called great who have sacrificed themselves for smaller objects, but in this I feel the satisfaction of knowing it to be a really worthy cause."

Sir Charles Dilke, who was destined to play a considerable part in the events of 1882 in Egypt, had in 1880 been only a few months at the Foreign Office. He and Chamberlain, who were great political friends, represented with Bright the Radical element in the new government. Chamberlain got the Local Government Board and a seat in the Cabinet, and Dilke the Foreign Under-Secretaryship, which, with his chief, Lord Granville, in the House of Lords and an idle man besides, was a position of great power Dilke knew how to take advantage of. Neither of the two men belonged to the class from which Ministers in England are usually chosen, but were looked upon as middle-class men, and I remember the disgust with which Dilke's appointment was received at the Foreign Office, where aristocratic pretensions are traditional among the clerks. Dilke, however, soon showed his mettle by the way he took his work in hand, and, what was even more to the purpose with them, by certain Gallicisms in conversation which were also a Foreign Office characteristic, so that in a very few weeks he found himself not only tolerated but popular. The Abdallah Ibn Saoud referred to in my journal was a certain Abdallah Ibn Theneyyàn Ibn Saoud, of the old princely family of Nejd, who had found his way to Constantinople, and had there applied to the British Embassy for help to gain or regain a political position in his own country. I had heard of him from Currie, and had jumped to the conclusion that this might be the opportunity I sought in Arabia, and so applied to the Foreign Office to put me in communication with him and favour my projected journey. The plan, however, came to nothing, though, as has been seen, not altogether disapproved at the Foreign Office, for when the matter was referred to Lord Tenterden, the permanent Under-Secretary, he demurred, on the ground that the thing if undertaken with the cognizance of the Foreign Office would be liable to be regarded as a "secret mission," and such missions were contrary to the traditions of the Office. And so the plan was abandoned. Just at this time, too, the news of the disgraceful defeat of the British army under Burrows at Candahar by the Afghans reached London, and I fancy made them doubly cautious in Downing Street. The defeat was a final blow to Lytton, and to the policy of adventure beyond the Indian frontier he had made his own, and at no time within recollection did the imperial fortunes of England seem so low. All the world was depressed by it, even I, little of a Jingo as I had become.

"August 5.—To Portsmouth by train, having got a telegram to say the Lyttons are expected to-night or to-morrow. Portsmouth is a strange, old-fashioned town, still without a decent inn; and we are at a pot-house called the 'Star and Garter.' In the house opposite there is a bust of Nelson, and from the windows one can see the 'St. Vincent' and the 'Victory.' Little as one may care for one's country—and Heaven knows I am no Chauvin—it is impossible not to be touched by these relics of England's greatness. I never till this moment quite realized the decay of her fortunes since sixty years ago. What a shock it would be for Nelson and his companions if he could read the papers to-day, full of dastardly congratulations at the discovery that not 2,000 but only 1,000 men were lost on the Helmund, and at General Burrows not having positively run away; of fears lest England should embark single-handed on a war with Turkey, and an abject hope that France may think fit to see us through our difficulties in the East—all this, with Lytton's arrival at Portsmouth, Lytton who, if things go wrong with India, will leave a name in history as the first of the unsuccessful Viceroys of the British Empress and the one most responsible for India's loss. All this, I say, gives one a feeling of sorrow impossible to describe. Yet I do not join with those who cry out on Lytton's policy, still less on its execution. His policy was a necessary one, and its execution has been bold and successful. He has been conspicuous in the history of England's decay only because he is himself conspicuous. He could not have stemmed the tide of events. He went with them, guiding as he could but powerless to do more. England's decay rests upon causes far more general than any one man or party of men can be responsible for. We fail because we are no longer honest, no longer just, no longer gentlemen. Our Government is a mob, not a body endowed with sense and supported by the sense of the nation. It was only by immense industry, immense sense, and immense honour that we gained our position in the world, and now that these are gone we find our natural level. For a hundred years we did good in the world; for a hundred we shall have done evil, and then the world will hear of us no more."

"August 6.—After several false alarms the 'Himalaya' was signalled; and, having fortunately met the rest of the small party of friends come to greet Lytton, we went out to meet her and were taken on board just opposite Osborne. At the gangway, brown as a berry and very ill dressed in clothes of four years ago and a flap-away Indian hat, stood Lytton with that cigarette in his mouth which cost him his Viceroyalty. On what trifles success depends! If he could have refrained from smoking out of season, and if he could have gone to church with his wife, all his sins, though they had been like scarlet, would have been forgiven him by the Anglo-Indian public. As it was, he had this against him throughout his reign, and it turned the scale when he was politically defeated. But for this he would never have been recalled. He himself, conscious of having done his best and done well, cares nothing for such things, and he is right. I could envy him this feeling almost as much as I envy him the delight of going home to Knebworth. When we had seen them on shore and taken tea with them at the inn, we wished them good-bye. 'Oh, the dear drunken people in the streets!' Lady Lytton exclaimed, 'how I love them!'"

"September 7.—Knebworth. In the morning I wrote and read, but in the afternoon I went down with Lytton to the fishing house and talked over the Eastern question, in which I find his views not very divergent from my own. We are both agreed that the day of England's empire is fast ending—for my own part I do not care how soon. Lytton has more patriotism."

"October 29.—Crabbet. Spent the day with Lytton ... he read me his defence for the House of Lords. He has an immensely strong case, and should make one of the most remarkable speeches of the age if he is allowed to bring forward all the documents in his possession. He showed me these, the Russian correspondence taken at Kabul and the draft of a secret treaty between Shere Ali and the Russians. He also told me that when he was going to India Schouvalof called on him and proposed to him to divide Afghanistan between Russia and England."

This is nearly the last entry in my journal of 1880, which unfortunately I discontinued till two years later. The full explanation Lytton was never allowed to make in Parliament, and his speech, robbed of its strongest points, fell comparatively flat when he made it before the House of Lords. I will, however, add an extract from a letter he wrote me on the 18th of November, which will complete this chapter of my story. It is of value as giving a very accurate epitome of the political situation of the date: "I saw," Lytton writes, "in one of the papers the other day a statement that the new Sherif of Mecca (Abdul Mutalleb), who is completely a tool of the Sultan, is working actively under orders from Constantinople to put the Mohammedans against us in all parts of the world. The cry is now, 'The Caliph in danger.' This was to be expected, and I fear the opportunity has passed for the good which might have been effected a year ago through the Arabs. The only result of Gladstone's action, so far as I can see, has been to destroy our influence at Constantinople and transfer it to Germany, without substituting for it any other means of controlling the Mohammedan world. The Mansion House speech (Gladstone's), expected with so much curiosity, seemed to me a weak confession of utter failure in the policy of the Government. They drop Greece and Armenia, and everything else, with the admission that their fingers are scorched by the burning end of the stick at which they grasped so wildly nine months ago. And in Ireland they are drifting into great difficulties which may even break up the Cabinet. The fact is the policy which the Government wants to carry out is everywhere rejected by the Nation; and the policy which the Nation wants carried out the Government naturally shies at, not wishing to stultify its promises and declarations. So the result is, for the present, no policy at all. As for myself I keep silence, morne et profond, till Parliament meets, though my heart burns within me."

The last weeks of my stay in England that autumn were, however, less occupied with politics than with the publication of a volume of poetry, to which I had been persuaded by Lytton, and the proofs of which I left to him to correct. This was "The Sonnets of Proteus," which had a considerable success and which has since gone through many editions. It gave me almost at once a certain rank in the literary world which was not altogether without its influence on my subsequent relations with my political friends.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Madame de Novikoff, a very charming woman, who was in the confidence of the Russian Government, had come to England for the first time a little before this date, her very earliest English visit being paid to us at Crabbet. She had brought an introduction to us from Madame de Lagrené, a Russian friend of ours living in Paris, and as yet knew no one. She stayed with us a week, but finding me unsympathetic with her anti-Islamic views, went on and soon after made a political capture of Mr. Gladstone.

[CHAPTER V]
THE REFORM LEADERS AT THE AZHAR

I left England that autumn of 1880 on the 3rd of November, in the first place for Egypt, and without any more definite further plan than to go on from thence to Jeddah and educate myself in view of possible future opportunities. My wilder schemes in regard to the Arabs seemed for the moment impracticable, and all that I hoped for was to gain sufficient knowledge of the doctrine and modern tendencies of Islam to put it into my power to act should circumstances become more favourable. On leaving London I had arranged with Hamilton that we should correspond during the winter, and that I would let him know anything of special interest which might occur on my journey and which he might communicate to Mr. Gladstone, who was still, he assured me, though I had not seen him again, interested in my ideas. At the Foreign Office I was looked upon, though in a friendly way, more as a visionary than as anything seriously likely to affect the official view of Eastern policy, even under a Radical Prime Minister.

At Cairo, where I arrived a few days later, I found much change, and all, as it seemed to me, for the better. The old irresponsible tyranny of Ismaïl had given place to the comparatively mild régime of the Anglo-French Condominium. The finances had been regularized, and order put into most of the Administrations. I visited some of the same villages I had known in such terrible straits five years before, and found that the worst evils affecting their position had been put a stop to, and, though still poor and highly-taxed, there was no longer that feeling of despair among the fellahin which had made them pour out the history of their woes to me when I had first come among them as a sympathetic stranger. I went to the British Agency, and was delighted to find established there as Consul-General my friend Malet, who gave me a roseate account of the reforms that had been effected or were in project, for as yet little had been actually done except financially. All was going slowly but steadily on the road of improvement, and the only clouds he could see on the horizon were, first, in the Soudan, which was so great a drain upon Egypt's resources, and, secondly, in the Army, where there had been latterly symptoms of discontent. He spoke much in praise of the new Khedive, Tewfik, and took me to see him at the Palace, and I found him, if not very interesting, at least holding the language of a civilized and liberal-minded Prince. An echo of Malet's optimism may be recognized in my letters from Egypt of that date, and I find the draft of one I wrote to Hamilton of which the following is an extract:

"I find a great change here for the better since five years ago, and, whatever may be the shortcomings the late Government may have to answer for elsewhere, their policy in Egypt certainly was a success. The country people now look fat and prosperous, and the few I have talked to, people who in former years complained bitterly of their condition, now praise the Khedive and his administration. They seem, for once, to have gone the right way to work here, making as few changes as possible in the system of government and only taking care that the men who caused the disorder should be changed. It was a great stroke of policy getting rid of Ismaïl, and I feel little doubt that with proper management the present man will go straight. Egypt is so rich and such a cheap country to govern that its finances must come right, if it limits its ambition to its own natural prosperity. But there are one or two rocks ahead, the government of the Soudan for instance, which will always be an expense and will always be an excuse for maintaining an army. I cannot conceive why Egypt should charge itself with governing the Nile beyond the First Cataract, its old boundary. Putting down the slave-trade in Africa is an amusement only rich countries need afford themselves. It will also be a great misfortune if such protection and supervision as the Government gets from England should be withdrawn, at least for some years and until a new generation has grown up used to a better order of things than the old. I should like immensely to see Syria put under another such régime. That, too, if there is no attempt to hold the desert, is a fairly rich country and might be made to pay its way. But it would require a very distinct protection from Europe to relieve it of the cost of an army. For police purposes a very small force would be sufficient, and I am convinced that people in England exaggerate immensely the difficulty of keeping the peace between the mixed Mohammedan and Christian populations there. These have all lain groaning together so long under the same tyranny that the edges of their prejudices have got worn down."

With regard to my plan of seeking Mohammedan instruction, I was from the outset singularly fortunate. Rogers Bey, a distinguished Eastern scholar whom I had known some years before as Consul at Damascus, was now an official of the Finance Office at Cairo, and from him I obtained the name of a young Alem connected with the Azhar University, Sheykh Mohammed Khalil, who came to me daily to give me lessons in Arabic, and stayed to talk with me often through the afternoons. It happened, however, that he was far more than a mere professor of the language of the Koran. Mohammed Khalil, of all the Mohammedans I have known, was perhaps the most single-minded and sincere and at the same time the most enthusiastic Moslem of the larger and purer school of thought such as that which was being expounded at that time at Cairo by his great master, Sheykh Mohammed Abdu. I like to think of him as he then was, a young man of about thirty, serious, intelligent, and good, without affectation, pious and proud of his religion, but without the smallest taint of Pharisaism or doctrinal intolerance or of that arrogant reserve which is so common with Mohammedans in dealing with persons not of their own faith. He was all the contrary to this. From almost the first day of our intercourse he made it his duty and his pleasure to teach me all he knew. His school of interpretation was of the very widest kind. He accepted as true creeds all those that professed the unity of God; and Judaism and Christianity were to him only imperfect and corrupted forms of the one true religion of Abraham and Noah. He would hear nothing of intolerance, nothing of bitterness between believers so near akin. The intolerance and the bitterness were the evil legacy of ancient wars, and he believed the world to be progressing towards a state of social perfection where arms would be laid down and a universal brotherhood proclaimed between the nations and the creeds. As he unfolded to me these ideas and based them on texts and traditions, declaring them to be the true teaching of Islam, it may be imagined how astonished and delighted I was—for they were very close to my own—and the more so when he affirmed that they were the views beginning to be held by all the more intelligent of the younger generation of students at his own university, as well as elsewhere in the Mohammedan world. He gave me, too, an account of how this school of enlightened interpretation had sprung up almost within his own recollection at the Azhar.

The true originator of the Liberal religious Reform movement among the Ulema of Cairo was, strangely enough, neither an Arab, nor an Egyptian, nor an Ottoman, but a certain wild man of genius, Sheykh Jemal-ed-din Afghani, whose sole experience of the world before he came to Egypt had been that of Central Asia. An Afghan by birth, he had received his religious education at Bokhara, and in that remote region, and apparently without coming in contact with any teacher from the more civilized centres of Mohammedan thought, he had evolved from his own study and reflection the ideas which are now associated with his name. Hitherto all movements of religious reform in Sunnite Islam had followed the lines not of development, but of retrogression. There had been a vast number of preachers, especially in the last 200 years, who had taught that the decay of Islam as a power in the world was due to its followers having forsaken the ancient ways of simplicity and the severe observance of the law as understood in the early ages of the faith. On the other hand, reformers there had been of a modern type recently, both in Turkey and Egypt, who had Europeanized the administration for political purposes, but these had introduced their changes as it were by violence, through decrees and approvals obtained by force from the unwilling Ulema, and with no serious attempt to reconcile them with the law of the Koran and the traditions. The political reforms had been always imposed from above, not suggested from below, and had generally been condemned by respectable opinion. Jemal-ed-din's originality consisted in this, that he sought to convert the religious intellect of the countries where he preached to the necessity of reconsidering the whole Islamic position, and, instead of clinging to the past, of making an onward intellectual movement in harmony with modern knowledge. His intimate acquaintance with the Koran and the traditions enabled him to show that, if rightly interpreted and checked the one by the other, the law of Islam was capable of the most liberal developments and that hardly any beneficial change was in reality opposed to it.

Having completed his studies in 1870, and being then thirty-two years old, he passed through India to Bombay and joined the pilgrimage to Mecca, and, this duty accomplished, he came on to Cairo and afterwards to Constantinople. He remained on this first visit no more than forty days in Egypt, but he had time to make acquaintance with certain of the Azhar students and to lay the foundations of the teaching he afterwards developed. At Constantinople his great eloquence and learning soon asserted itself, and he was given a position in the Anjuman el Elm, where he lectured on all subjects, his knowledge being almost universal. He had great quickness of intellect and an astonishing memory, so that it is said of him that he could read a book straight off on any subject and master the whole contents as inscribed upon his mind forever. Beginning with grammar and science, his lectures went on to philosophy and religion. He taught that Sunnite Islam was capable of adapting itself to all the highest cravings of the human soul and the needs of modern life. As an orthodox Sunni, and with the complete knowledge he had of the hawadith, he was listened to with respect and soon got a following among the younger students. He inspired courage by his own boldness, and his critical treatment of the received commentaries, even those of El Hánafi, was accepted by them as it would hardly have been from any other. Their consciences he was at pains to free from the chains in which thought had lain for so many centuries, and to show them that the law of Islam was no dead hand but a system fitted for the changing human needs of every age, and so itself susceptible of change. All this stood in close analogy to what we have seen of the re-awakening of the Christian intellect during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe and its adaption of orthodox doctrines to the scientific discoveries of the day. It is strange, however, that in Western Islam the new spirit of criticism should have been initiated as it was, by one whose education had been made in such unprogressive lands as those of Central Asia, and at a university so far away.

Sheykh Jemal-ed-din's career at Constantinople was a brilliant but a short one. He was essentially a free lance, and, like most Afghans, a disregarder of persons and of those ceremonial observances which regulate among the Ottoman dignitaries the personal intercourse of the great with those who attend their levées. Although protected by certain of the Liberal Statesmen, and notably by Ali and Fuad Pashas, who saw in his teaching a support to their unorthodox political reforms against the old-fashioned Ulema, Jemal-ed-din had managed to give offence to the high religious authorities, and especially by his independent personal attitude to the Sheykh el Islam, and these soon found in his lectures matter for reproof and condemnation. Advantage was taken of certain passages in his lectures to denounce him to the Government as an atheist and a perverter of the law, and when the Afghan reformer had replied by a courageous demand to be confronted with his high accusers and heard in a public discussion the official sense of propriety was shocked and alarmed. The challenge was producing an immense excitement among the Softas, the younger of whom were all on Jemal-ed-din's side, and the quarrel seemed likely to lead to serious trouble. Notice was somewhat reluctantly given that he had better leave once more for Egypt and the Holy Places. It was thus under the cloud of religious persecution that he returned to Cairo, but not without having sown the seed of inquiry which was to mature some years later at Constantinople in the shape of a general demand among the Softas for constitutional reform. It was the religious part of the movement which was to culminate in the political revolution attempted by Midhat Pasha in 1876.

At the Azhar, when he returned to Cairo in 1871, Jemal-ed-din's reputation had of course preceded him, and, though Egypt was then in the darkest night of its religious unintelligence, for the moral corruption of the Government, especially in Ismaïl's reign, had infected all classes and had extinguished every tradition of courage and independence among the Ulema, considerable curiosity was felt about him. The few friends he had made on the occasion of his first visit welcomed him, if not openly, in secret, and presently the wonderful fire and zeal of his conversation drew around him, as it had done at Constantinople, a group of young and enthusiastic followers. The most remarkable of these, his earliest disciples at the Azhar, were Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, who was to play so important a part in public affairs later and who is now Grand Mufti of Egypt, and Sheykh Ibrahim el Aghani the well-known publicist. To these he was able to communicate without reserve his stores of varied knowledge, and to inspire them with his critical spirit and something of his courage. Courage indeed was needed in those days for any man at Cairo to speak out. Ismaïl brooked no kind of opposition and wielded power so absolute in the country that independent speech, almost independent whispering, had disappeared from men's mouths. It was only the fellahin of the village, already despoiled of all, that dared complain, or those in the city too poor and insignificant to be of any political count. The highest religious authorities, as well as the highest officials, had long been silent about injustice and had chosen their part of acquiescence, content so long as they could get their share, each one however small, of the general plunder.

On this dark state of intellectual and moral things Jemal-ed-din's courageous teaching broke like an apparition of strange light, and his very courage for awhile secured him a hearing undisturbed by admonition from the Government. Perhaps his quarrel at Constantinople was a passport to Ismaïl's tolerance, perhaps he deemed this Afghan too insignificant a force to call for suppression. Perhaps, like Ali and Fuad Pashas, he thought to turn the new teaching to account in his long war with the European Consuls. Be this as it may, Jemal-ed-din was allowed during the whole of the remaining years of Ismaïl's reign to carry on his lectures, and it was only on Tewfik's accession and the establishment of the Anglo-French condominium that he was arrested on an executive order, sent untried to Alexandria, and summarily exiled. He had, however, already done his work, and at the time of which I am writing his principles of Liberal reform upon a theological basis had so far prevailed at the Azhar that they had already been adopted by all that was intellectual there among the students. The reformer's mantle had fallen upon worthy shoulders, shoulders indeed it may be said, worthier even than his own. My little Arabic instructor, Mohammed Khalil, was never weary of speaking to me of the virtues and intellectual qualities of him who was now his spiritual master, Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, the acknowledged leader at the Azhar, in Jemal-ed-din's succession, of the Liberal Party of reform.

I find a note among my papers that it was on the 28th of January, 1881, that I was first taken by my enthusiastic Alem to Mohammed Abdu's little house in the Azhar quarter, a day to be marked by me with an especially white stone, for it began for me a friendship which has lasted now for nearly a quarter of a century with one of the best and wisest, and most interesting of men. When I use these words of him it must not be thought that they are light or exaggerated judgment. I base them on a knowledge of his character gained in a variety of circumstances on very difficult and trying occasions, first as a religious teacher, next as leader of a movement of social reform and as the intellectual head of a political revolution; again, as prisoner in the hands of his enemies, as exile in various foreign lands, and for some years under police surveillance at Cairo when his exile had been annulled; lastly, by the strength of his intellect and his moral character reasserting himself as a power in his own country, resuming his lectures at the Azhar, placed in the judicature, named Judge of Appeal, and finally, in these last days, Grand Mufti at Cairo, the highest religious and judicial position attainable in Egypt.

Sheykh Mohammed Abdu when I first saw him in 1881 was a man of about thirty-five, of middle height, dark, active in his gait, of quick intelligence revealed in singularly penetrating eyes, and with a manner frank and cordial and inspiring ready confidence. In dress and appearance purely Oriental, wearing the white turban and dark kaftan of the Azhar Sheykhs and knowing as yet no European language, or, indeed, other language than his own. With him I discussed, with the help of Mohammed Khalil, who knew a little French and helped on my insufficient Arabic, most of those questions I had already debated with his disciple, and between them I obtained before leaving Cairo a knowledge really large of the opinions of their liberal school of Moslem thought, their fears for the present, and their hopes for the future. These I afterwards embodied in a book published at the end of the year under the title of "The Future of Islam." Sheykh Mohammed Abdu was strong on the point that what was needed for the Mohammedan body politic was not merely reforms but a true religious reformation. On the question of the Caliphate he looked at that time, in common with most enlightened Moslems, to its reconstitution on a more spiritual basis. He explained to me how a more legitimate exercise of its authority might be made to give a new impulse to intellectual progress, and how little those who for centuries had held the title had deserved the spiritual headship of believers. The House of Othman for two hundred years had cared almost nothing for religion, and beyond the right of the sword had no claim any longer to allegiance. They were still the most powerful of Mohammedan princes and so able to do most for the general advantage, but unless they could be induced to take their position seriously a new Emir el Mumenin might legitimately be looked for. Certainly a new political basis was urgently required for the spiritual needs of Islam. In all this there was a tone of moderation in the expression of his views very convincing of their practical wisdom.

In the course of the winter I made with my wife our intended visit to Jeddah, where I gathered much information of the kind I sought as to the opinions of the various sects of Islam. No place accessible to Europeans could have been better chosen for the purpose, and I made the acquaintance of a number of interesting Moslems through the help of one Yusuf Effendi Kudsi, who had a connection with the English Consulate. Among them the most remarkable were Sheykh Hassan Johar, a learned and very intelligent Somali, Sheykh Abd-el-Rahman Mahmud from Hyderabad in India, Sheykh Meshaat of Mecca, several members of the Bassam family from Aneyzah in Nejd, and a certain Bedouin Sheykh, a highly educated man, from Southern Morocco. My stay in Jeddah, however, was but a short one, as I fell ill of a malarious fever very prevalent there, and this prevented any idea I may still have had of penetrating into the interior. The moment, too, I found was a most unfavourable one for any plan of this kind, through the new hostility of the Meccan authorities to England. Already the Sultan Abdul Hamid had begun to assert himself, a thing for many generations unknown to his Ottoman predecessors, as spiritual Head of Islam, and in Arabia especially he had become jealous of his authority, while his quarrel with our Government made him suspicious, more than of any other, of English influences. Only a few months before my visit to Jeddah he had made a vigorous assertion of his authority at Mecca by the appointment of a new Grand Sherif of strong reactionary and anti-European views. The former Grand Sherif Huseyn Ibn Aoun had been a man of liberal ideas and known for his friendly relations with the English Consulate, and had so incurred his displeasure and met a violent death. Whether this was in reality contrived by the Sultan, or perhaps his Valy, it is not possible precisely to say, but it was certainly believed to have been so when I was at Jeddah.

I learned the particulars of the Sherif Huseyn's death from his agent at Jeddah, Omar Nassif, who most certainly laid it to the Sultan's charge. According to this account, which I have since had confirmed to me from other quarters of authority, Huseyn had just ridden down from Mecca at the close of the pilgrimage, as the custom was, to Jeddah, there to give his blessing to the departing pilgrims. He had travelled down by night and was making his entrance on horseback to the seaport riding in state with an escort, partly Arab, partly Ottoman, intending to alight at Omar Nassif's house, when an Afghan pilgrim poorly dressed, came forward from the crowd as if to ask alms and stabbed him in the belly. The Sherif, though wounded, rode on and died in his agent's house in the course of the day, having, as I heard, been unskilfully treated for his wound which need not have been fatal. There were various circumstances which seemed to differentiate the case from one of fanaticism or common murder. The assassin was no Shiah schismatic, as was first supposed, but an orthodox Sunni, and he used language after his arrest which seemed to show that he considered himself commissioned. "There was an elephant," he said, when asked the reason for his deed, "the greatest beast of the forest, and to him was sent an ant, the least of living creatures, and the ant bit him and he died." Also there was no open trial made of the assassin, who was executed within four days of his arrest, while everything was done to hush up as far as was possible and conceal the affair.

Huseyn's successor who was of the rival house of Zeyd, the Sherif Abdul Mutalleb, belonged to the extremest school of Mohammedan reaction. He was an aged man, old enough to have been Sherif at the time Mecca was occupied by the Wahhabis, when he had conformed, at least outwardly, to the Wahhabi doctrine. Now, in extreme age, he was reinstated as Prince in order to further the Pan-Islamic views held at Constantinople. Under Huseyn it would have been very possible for an Englishman to have travelled through the Hejaz without molestation, and both Doughty and Professor Robertson Smith had received his aid and protection. Now any such attempt would have been very dangerous, and, in fact, the French traveller Hüber lost his life in venturing in that same year. We consequently returned to Suez, and later by Ismaïlia into Syria.

Passing through Egypt I received the following letters from Hamilton in answer to two of mine. They are principally interesting as showing how the Government's attention to Eastern matters was already being diverted and distracted by their troubles nearer at home in Ireland. It is a curious and melancholy thing to observe how the necessity, as the Whigs in the Cabinet considered it to be, of putting down nationalism and liberty in Ireland reacted upon the fine feelings they had expressed so readily out of office of sympathy with national freedom in the East. Gladstone, whose inclination no doubt would have been for liberty in both directions, had weighed himself in the Cabinet by these Whig Ministers, his colleagues, who were all along bent on leading him in the opposite direction. Ireland throughout the history of the next two years proved the stumbling-block of his policy, and, as I will show in its place, the decision of coercion there was decided on in 1882 at the self-same Cabinet Council with the decision to coerce in Egypt. The connection of misfortune between the two countries was a fatality not a little tragical, both to the countries themselves and doubly so to English honour.

"10, Downing Street, Decr. 22, 1880.

"... I took the liberty of showing your letter to several who I knew would like to read it, including Lord Granville, Rivers Wilson, Pembroke, and Harry Brand. I think it especially pleased Rivers Wilson, who looks with a very tender eye on his work in Egypt, and who was naturally gratified to hear from an independent source that what he had so prominent a hand in had resulted in so much good. I am afraid he considers that his own contribution to the result has not been fully appreciated.

"Ireland has continued to monopolize all the time and energies of the Government, and I am afraid it is difficult to exaggerate the grave state of affairs in that distracted country. Thank goodness, we are now within hail of the re-assembling of Parliament. Whether or no the Government has erred on the side of over-patience and excessive forbearance remains to be proved, and it is not for me to venture to express an opinion. The present state of things is certainly a disgrace to this country; and the Government are driven reluctantly to hark back on the old stereotyped course of strong coercive measures. I am beginning, most unwillingly, to think that Ireland is not fitted for a Constitutional Government, and that, however much we may try to remove legitimate grievances, she will not be got into hand again without a return to something like a Cromwellian policy. It is heart-breaking work all round, and unless some extraordinary transformation can be effected, we shall probably have to submit in this country to any amount of shipwrecks of governments within the next few years. I feel very gloomy as to the look out. Would that we could apply to Ireland a regeneration such as you have found in Egypt.... That wretched Ireland has nearly knocked the Government out of time as regards foreign policy. They will, however, still manage, I hope, to find a corner of room for Greece, and not let that question entirely slide, which would inevitably mean war between Turkey and Greece. Greece could never contend single-handed with Turkey successfully, and Turkey at war would probably be the signal for a general revolt in Eastern Roumelia and Macedonia. I still trust some sort of compromise on the question of adjusting the territory of the kingdom of the Hellenes may be effected by the intervention of the Powers in the direction of a small slice northwards, and perhaps the handing over of Crete. There is no doubt that a means of strengthening and opening out Greece must be found, not only to keep the peace temporarily in the East, but to lay the foundations for some power that may grow into a set-off against the Slavic nationalities...."

"10, Downing Street, Feby. 11, 1881.

"Your letter has since its receipt made a little ministerial round. I read parts of it to Mr. Gladstone; and Lord Granville and Mr. Goschen have both had the benefit of perusing it themselves, and of perusing it, as I am told, with interest. Lord Granville, moreover, sent a copy of your postscript, which related to Indian matters, to Lord Hartington. I hope in having turned your information to official account I shall not be considered to have abused your confidence. I have shown it also to Harry Brand. His father, the Speaker, has had difficulties to encounter such as no predecessor in the Chair ever had before; and he has come out of the ordeal magnificently. What with unprecedented continuous sitting of the House for days and nights and wholesale suspensions of obstructive Members, we have been having most exciting Parliamentary times. I trust, however, that the neck of obstruction as of the Irish land-agitation has been fairly well broken; and when once the Coercive, or rather Protective, measures have been passed, and a fair, just and strong and comprehensive Land Bill has become law, we shall not be troubled again immediately with the Irish nightmare.

"Meanwhile of course all public attention has for the last few months been centred on that wretched God-forsaken country, and the public have not troubled their heads much with foreign affairs. However, the Greek question has not been forgotten. Lord Granville has been pulling the strings most diplomatically, and not, I hope, without success. Of course the great stumbling-block of making head with this difficult question has been the very shabby part which France has played, first blowing so hot and then blowing so cold. However, Bismarck has been induced to take the initiative in making a new proposal which may possibly lead to good results. The primary condition of all the Powers is of course to maintain the peace of Europe. If it were not that the outbreak of war between Turkey and Greece would almost inevitably lead to the outbreak of disturbances and fighting in Bulgaria and Eastern Roumelia, and if it were not that Greece's chances single-handed in a combat would be very small, the natural preliminary to Greece raising herself in the European scale would be by an appeal to the sword. The modern Romans would not have had a united kingdom but for fighting for it, and the modern Greeks could hardly complain were they obliged to face similar difficulties and dangers. But apart from the dangers of a stand-up fight, Greece, having been made the special protégé of Europe, has a right not to be thrown overboard now. If the Berlin award cannot be enforced peacefully—and owing to France's action this seems to be admitted—I believe the massacre of the award has been termed in diplomatic phraseology, 'Le Barthélemy de St. Hilaire'—the best alternative seems to be to find some equivalent for Greece—I mean by compensating her elsewhere for what she does not obtain, Thessaly and Epirus, which she would accept and which the Powers would in concert help her to obtain. Such a proposal as this may possibly be the new departure. I am afraid your remedies, though far more effective, are too drastic for acceptance by Europe."

I do not remember what in my letters can have suggested this long digression about Greece, which did not particularly interest me at the time. The phraseology of the letter is so like Mr. Gladstone's own that I half think this and the previous letter must have been more or less dictated by him. For this reason I quote them almost in extenso, and because the long account of the difficulties of his Greek policy suggested to me the idea that perhaps he might, if there was a rising on the Greek frontier, also encourage one concurrently with it of the Arabs in Syria.

Our journey from Ismaïlia was an interesting one. Once across the Suez Canal we struck due eastwards, over a long track of sand dunes, to a very little known hill region called the Jebel Hellal. This, on a small scale, has some of the characteristics of Nejd, in vegetation and in the arrangement of its sand drifts, and we made friendly acquaintance there with the Aiaideh, the Teyyaha, and, further north, with the Terrabin tribes, as well as with those very Azazimeh with whom we had been so nearly having an encounter five years before. All these tribes were at that time independent of the Ottoman Government, living as they did in the no man's land which forms the frontier between Syria and Egypt. They had, however, as is always the case in independent Arabia, been at feud with each other and, with debts of blood on either side, the war had gone on and on, causing much disturbance even to the confines of Gaza. The Ottoman Government, to put an end to the trouble, had resorted to one of their common devices. They had invited the chiefs of the two principal tribes to a friendly conference with the Muteserif of Gaza, and had had them treacherously surrounded and captured, and were now holding them as hostages for the peace of the frontier in prison at Jerusalem. At that time the long tradition of English influence in Turkey was still alive among the Arabs, and as we passed through the tribes the relations of the imprisoned sheykhs besought my intervention with the Government to obtain their release. In pity for them I consented to do what I could, and I took with me the acting Sheykh of the Teyyaha, Ali Ibn Atiyeh, and the little son of the Sheykh of the Terrabin, who rode on with us to Jerusalem, making our way over the hills by no road so that we arrived at El Kuds, or rather at Bethlehem, without having entered a single town or village on all our journey. At Jerusalem I called at once upon our Consul, Moore, and obtained through him from the Pasha an order to visit the prisons, and found there the sheykhs I was in search of in an underground dungeon near the Mosque of Omar. They were in a pitiable condition, suffering from disease and long confinement, and I made an application to the governor on their behalf for an amnesty for them on condition that a general peace should be agreed to between the tribes, an agreement which I had got them to sign and seal. The Muteserif, however, declared himself incompetent to order their release, and referred me to his superior, the Valy of Damascus, as being in a position to do so; and to Damascus we therefore went, still accompanied by Ali Ibn Atiyeh and with our camel caravan, by way of the Jordan valley and the Hauran plain, a beautiful and interesting journey, for the whole country, there having been heavy rain, was a garden of Eden with flowers. In the Hauran we found war going on between the Ottoman troops and the Druses, but managed to slip by between the two armies without molestation and so arrived at Damascus, where we alighted at a little house in the Bab Touma quarter which I had purchased, with an acre of garden behind it, on our visit of three years before when we were starting for Nejd.

Our house at Damascus was next door to that of the well-known Englishwoman Lady Ellenborough, or, as she was now called, Mrs. Digby, who, after many curious adventures in the East and West, had married in her old age a Bedouin sheykh of one of the Anazeh tribe, and was living with her husband, Mijwel, at Damascus, being no longer able to bear the hardships of her former desert life. From her and from her excellent husband, whom we knew well, we received the advice that we should put our case for the release of the prisoners neither before the Consul nor directly before the Valy, but indirectly through the intermediary of their distinguished friend and our acquaintance of 1878, Seyyid Abd-el-Kader, whose influence at Damascus was more powerful on all things relating to the Arabs than any other with the Government. Abd-el-Kader was then a very old man, and was leading a life of religious retirement and held in great reverence by all in the city, and amongst the Arabs in Syria especially, he had a large following, for he had often proved their protector. Mijwel assured me that it would be merely a matter of money with the Valy and that if the Seyyid would undertake the negotiation with a sufficient sum in hand it could be easily managed. I consequently called with him and Ali Ibn Atiyeh on Abd-el-Kader, whom we found with his eldest son Mohammed, a very worthy man, born to him while he was still in Algeria of an Algerian mother, and explained our errand, and the Seyyid gladly consented to be our intercessor with the Pasha, and if possible to arrange for the release of the Teyyaha and Terrabin sheykhs on the condition prescribed of a general peace between the tribes, and I left with him a bag containing 400 Napoleons in gold, which he considered would be a sufficient sum to obtain what we required. Bribery was so much a matter of course in dealing with Ottoman officials in those days that I do not think either the Seyyid or I or any of us had a scruple about offering the money. The sum was a large one, but my sympathy was strong with the imprisoned Bedouins, and I had it at heart to be able to send Ali Ibn Atiyeh back to Jerusalem with an order of release for them. So I made the sacrifice. As it turned out, however, the negotiation failed of the effect intended. A few days later the bag was brought back to me by Mohammed Ibn Abd-el-Kader untouched, with a message from his father that the Valy sent me his compliments and would have been very pleased to be agreeable to me in the matter but it was beyond his competence; it had already been referred to Constantinople, and it was there alone that the thing could be arranged.

The sequel of this little incident is curious, and has a direct bearing on events the following year in Egypt. Finding my local efforts vain, I took the Valy's advice and wrote to Goschen, our Ambassador at Constantinople, and laid the case before him, urging as a reason for his interesting himself in it, that possibly some day our Government might have need of securing the passage of the Suez Canal from possible attack on the eastern side should England happen to be at war with any other power. Goschen, if I remember rightly, took some steps in the matter, and when a few weeks later Lord Dufferin succeeded him at the embassy it was handed on to him, and eventually, after long waiting, what I had asked was granted, and the sheykhs were set free. My suggestion, however, about the tribes was to bear fruit later of a kind I did not at all contemplate or intend, for when in the summer of 1882, the military expedition under Wolseley was decided on, it was remembered by Goschen, or some one else connected with the Government, and, using my name with the Bedouins, a secret agent was sent precisely to the tribes I had befriended south of the Gaza to draw them into alliance with the English forces against the Egyptian Nationalist army. I was therefore, as they say, unworthily "hoist with my own petard." This was the famous Palmer mission, about which I shall have more to say in its place.

Syria and all the Arab frontier was at this time in a great state of political ferment. There were two currents of feeling there among Mohammedans, the one of fanaticism fostered by the Sultan, the other in favour of liberal reform, representing the two sides of the Pan-Islamic movement, and at Damascus it was represented to me that the feeling against the Sultan and the corrupt Ottoman administration was so strong that a general revolt might at any time occur. I spoke to Mohammed Ibn Abd-el-Kader about it, and found that he and his father were strongly on the liberal side and that, like the rest of the Arabic speaking Ulema, they favoured the idea of an Arabian Caliphate, if such could be made to come about; and the thought occurred to me that no one then living had a better title to be candidate for the Ottoman succession than Abd-el-Kader himself might have. I therefore begged Mohammed to sound the old Seyyid on the subject, and to ask him whether he would be willing, should such a movement come to a head, to be put forward as its leader. Mohammed did so, and brought back a message from his father to the effect that, though too old to take any active part in a movement of the kind himself, his sons would be willing, and he would not refuse to give his name as a candidate for the Caliphate, should such candidature be thrust upon him. There would, however, be no chance of success to the movement unless it should have support from without, the Ottoman Government being militarily too strong, and it was arranged that I should communicate his answer confidentially to our Government and ascertain what attitude England would assume in case of a Syrian rising. This therefore I did, using my usual channel of communication with Mr. Gladstone, his private secretary Hamilton, asking what help the Arabian movement might count on. I suggested, in reference to Hamilton's letter already quoted, that such a movement might be favourably regarded by our Government, especially in connection with their difficulties with the Porte about Greece. Gladstone's interest, however, in the East and in foreign politics had by this time altogether cooled down, and Hamilton's answer was brief and discouraging. "I hope," he wrote, "that there is good prospect that the war between Greece and Turkey will be averted, and therefore I trust there will be no necessity to resort to your scheme in Syria. I can, I am afraid, only say that it is conceived that such a state of things might arise when something of the sort you suggest might be necessary, but that the case is not considered to have arisen. This is confused and enigmatic, but I fear I can say no more." With this I had to be content, and I made no delay in communicating the result to the Seyyid.

The rest of our journey that summer was without political interest. We again visited our friends the Anezeh Bedouins, whom we found encamped near Palmyra, but our dealings with them were merely about horses. The Anezeh care nothing about politics other than those of the desert and as little for the affairs of religion. They can hardly indeed be counted as even nominally Mohammedans, as they neither fast nor pray nor practice any Moslem observance. Their only connection with Islam is that they have in common with it the old Arabian customary law on which the law of the Sheriat was founded, but they do not, as far as I have ever been able to ascertain, hold any of the Moslem beliefs except vaguely and negatively the unity of God. They are without respect for Prophet or Saint or Koran, and know nothing whatever of a future life. With them we travelled northwards to the border of their wanderings and found ourselves at the beginning of the summer heat at Aleppo, and soon after once more in England.[6]

FOOTNOTES:

[6] It is worth recording that while at Aleppo on this occasion we made friends with two English officers afterwards prominently connected with Egypt and the Soudanese war, Colonel Stewart, who shared with Gordon in the defence of Khartoum against the Mahdi, and Colonel Sir Charles Wilson who succeeded to the command of the British army at Metemneh after the battle of Abu Klea. Stewart, at my suggestion, made a tour that summer among the Anazeh and Shammar Bedouins, but failed to get on good terms with them, the truth being that he was quite out of sympathy with Orientals. Wilson, a man of far wider ideals, accompanied us on our homeward journey as far as Smyrna, which we reached in the time of Midhat Pasha's arrest. Both were at that date Consuls in Asia Minor of the perambulating kind provided by the terms of the Cyprus Convention.

[CHAPTER VI]
BEGINNINGS OF THE REVOLUTION IN EGYPT

The summer of 1881 I spent almost entirely at Crabbet, writing the book which was the fruit of my winter experience: "The Future of Islam." It was composed somewhat in haste and under circumstances unfavourable to deliberate judgment, for in the very act of writing it, events crowded so closely on events, and portents upon portents that a calm forecast of Islam's destiny seemed at times almost impossible. Nevertheless, and in spite of many defects, I look upon the work as still of serious value, if only historically, as showing the condition of the Mohammedan hopes and fears of the day when it was written. In it I committed myself without reserve to the Cause of Islam as essentially the "Cause of Good" over an immense portion of the world, and to be encouraged, not repressed, by all who cared for the welfare of mankind. I gave an historical sketch of its origin, its glories, and its apparent decay, a decay which was very similar to that which had seemed to overtake Christendom four hundred years before, and which might be met as Christendom had met its troubles by a religious reformation and the freeing of its thought from the bondage of a too strict tradition impeding its evolution. I expounded the ideas, as I had learned them from Sheykh Abdu, of the liberal school of teaching, and appealed to all that was best among my own countrymen to sympathize with their hopes as against the party of reaction which, hide-bound in the old and evil ways, had nothing to offer but a recrudescence of fanaticism and a last desperate appeal against its many enemies to the sword. To England especially, as interested so largely in the future of Islam through India, I addressed myself, urging that her policy should be an active one of friendship with the better elements of Eastern thought in its struggle with the worse, not merely to profit by its decay for the extension of her own material interests. "The main point," I said, "is that England should fulfil the trust she has accepted (by her inheritance of the Mogul Empire and her long connection with Ottoman affairs) of developing, not destroying the existing elements of good in Asia. She cannot destroy Islam or dissolve her own connection with her. Therefore, in God's name, let her take Islam by the hand and encourage her boldly in the path of virtue. This is the only worthy course and the only wise one, wiser and worthier, I venture to assert, than a whole century of crusade."

The chapters of this little volume, as they came out in monthly numbers of the "Fortnightly Review," produced a considerable effect in England and also among the English-reading Moslems of India, and found their way, to some extent, in translation to Egypt. Already, while I was writing them, it had become clear that great events were imminent in the Mohammedan world and were even now in progress. Early in May the French Government with hardly a note of warning, and in pursuance of the secret arrangement made at Berlin three years before between M. Waddington and our Foreign Office, invaded Tunis and, on the fanciful pretext of protecting the Bey from a quite unreal danger threatened him by his subjects, occupied the western portion of the Regency and proclaimed a French Protectorate. This sudden act of aggression on a perfectly inoffensive and harmless neighbour was justified by nothing in the condition of the province either in the way of ill government or danger to Europeans or even financial embarrassment. The Bey himself was a mild and respectable personage, and had in no way forfeited the goodwill of his people. The seizure of his person by General Bréart, and the usurpation of his authority by the French Republic was an act of cynical illegality almost without parallel in the history of modern aggression upon weaker nations, if we except the invasion of Egypt by Bonaparte in 1799, and was generally condemned in England where the history of the Berlin betrayal was not as yet suspected. In the Mohammedan world it lit a flame of anger and dismay which gathered in intensity as the truth became slowly known. The western Tunisians, taken wholly by surprise at first, had hardly fired a shot against the French, and the Bey had been forced to sign the Treaty presented to him at the sword's point by Bréart, which surrendered the independence of the Regency, before the real state of the case came to be understood. But in the eastern provinces the tribes of the desert took up arms, and before the middle of summer the revolt had spread to the Algerian Sahara and a wave of anger against Christendom was rolling eastwards which, as will be seen, had begun to affect Egypt dangerously, and remains in truth to this day responsible for precipitating the action of the liberal reformers there and of the army in demanding self government.

It is worth noting, as showing the complicity of our Government in this scandalous affair, that Lord Granville allowed himself to be content with an assurance given him by the French Government, that the occupation of the Regency was only for the restoration of order, though it was patent that order had not been so much as threatened, and that it would not continue a day longer than might be necessary to secure the safety of the Bey's Government—a line of falsehood closely imitated by Lord Granville himself the following year when the positions of France and England were reversed in Egypt. It is most noticeable too that, though Parliament was sitting at the time, Lord Salisbury, the leader of the opposition, maintained an absolute silence about Tunis, though his followers, who did not know his secret reasons, were clamorous for explanations. Bismarck was equally silent at Berlin, and no single Power of those who had been represented at Berlin dissented, though the Italian public was deeply aggrieved by the French action. The Sultan alone of them recorded his public protest, Tunis having been always reckoned as part of the Ottoman dominions. By the European Governments it was accepted speedily as a fait accompli.

The history of the rise of what in the summer of 1881 began to be known as the Egyptian National movement needs here to be told. It had its origin as a practical idea in the last desperate efforts made by the Khedive Ismaïl when he had quarrelled with Wilson to maintain himself in power against the consular tutelage in which he had, by his folly and his debts, placed himself. He sought to recover the moral status he had lost and the goodwill of his subjects by making to them a popular appeal for support, and in the spring of 1879 he proclaimed his intention of calling together an assembly of Notables. There is little doubt that his intention was, under the cloak of a national demand, to repudiate at least a portion of the debt, and though no one in Egypt, except perhaps certain European residents, thought him sincere, the idea of a constitutional form of government as a remedy for the ills they were suffering began from that time to be popularized at Cairo. Sheykhs Jemal-ed-din and his school had always maintained that the growing absolutism of Mohammedan princes in modern times was contrary to the spirit of Islam which in its essence was a Republic where every Moslem had the right of free speech in its assemblies, and where the authority of the ruler rested on his conformity to the law and on popular approval. Ismaïl was condemned by the Azhar reformers on the double ground of his being a breaker of the law and a political tyrant. In the spring of 1879 it had been much discussed among them in private how, and by what means, he could be deposed or even, if there were no other way, removed by assassination. It was the consciousness of his double peril, both at home and from Europe, and of the opinions held at the Azhar that determined him to appear as a Constitutionalist. Constitutionalism, it must, moreover, be remembered, was much in the air just then not only in Egypt, but at Constantinople, where an assembly had met convoked by decree of the Sultan only five years before. Little, therefore, as Ismaïl was trusted by the Reformers, his new move was one of which they could not but approve, and it was taken up and expounded by such printed organs of opinion as had furtively begun to be established at Cairo under their direction. Apart from the Azhar, there were not a few of the high officials who at this time were Constitutionalists, notably Sherif Pasha, Ali Pasha Mubarak and Mahmud Bey Sami el Barodi. Nor was this all. The Khedive's heir apparent and eventual successor, Mohammed Tewfik, had come under Jemal-ed-din's potent influence, and through him was in close communication with the Reformers, and had given them repeated pledges that if ever he came to the Khedivial throne he would govern on strictly constitutional lines. Ismaïl's latest Ministry, which lasted three months, included Tewfik and Sherif, Constitutionalists both, and they were actually in charge of the administration when the old Khedive was deposed.

Tewfik's accession was therefore greeted by Jemal-ed-din and the Reformers as a stroke of good fortune, and, though they regretted that it had not been in the power of the Egyptians themselves to depose the tyrant, they looked forward to the new régime with the confident expectation of men who had at last obtained a lever to their wishes. The new Khedive, however, like many another heir apparent when he has succeeded to power, was not long in changing his opinion, and a month had hardly elapsed before he had forgotten his promises and betrayed his friends. Tewfik's character was one of extreme weakness. The son of a woman who had been a servant only in his father's house, he had been from his childhood treated as of small account by Ismaïl and brought up by his mother in bodily fear of the unscrupulous Khedive, and in those habits of insincerity and dissimulation which in the East are the traditional safeguards of the unprotected. He had grown up in this way, in the harem more than with men, and had been unable to rid himself of a certain womanish timidity which prompted him always to yield his opinion in the presence of a stronger will than his own, and after yielding, to regain his ground, if possible, by indirect means and covertly as is the habit of women. He had, too, a large share of the womanish quality of jealousy and of the love of small vengeances. Otherwise, in his domestic life he was well-conducted as compared with most of his predecessors, and not unadorned with respectable virtues. As a ruler his was too negative a character not to be a danger to those who had to deal with him. His first impulse was always to conceal the truth and to place upon others the blame of any failure that might have occurred by his fault. His resentments were shown not by open displeasure, but by tale-bearing and false suggestion and the setting of one against another where he desired to prevail or be revenged. It has been said of him that he was never sincere, and that no one ever trusted him who was not betrayed.

When therefore on his accession Tewfik found himself placed between two forces with opposite ends in view, the force of his reforming friends urging him to fulfil his constitutional promises, and the force of the consulates forbidding him to part with any of his power, a power they intended to exercise in his name themselves, he consented first to his Minister Sherif's suggestion that he should issue a decree granting a Constitution and then at the instance of the Consuls refused to sign it. This led to Sherif's resignation, and the substitution in his place of a nominee of the Consulates, Riaz Pasha, on whom these counted to carry out their ideas of financial reform while leaving him full power, under the Rescript of 1878, to carry on the internal administration as he would, without check from any Council or Assembly, in the Khedive's name. The weakness shown by the Khedive in this, the first important decision of his reign, was the cause of all his future troubles. Had he remained loyal to his promises to the Reformers and to his Ministers, and summoned at that time a Council of Notables, he would have had his subjects enthusiastically with him and would have been spared the intrigues and counter intrigues which marked the next two years and prepared the way for the revolution of 1882. As it was, he found himself by his compliance deprived of all authority, and treated as a mere dummy prince by Consuls whose will he had obeyed and by his new Minister.

The character of Riaz has been much debated. At the time of my visit to Egypt in the autumn of 1881, his name was in execration with the Nationalists as the author of the violent but abortive measures which had been taken for their repression, but as I now think in part unjustly. Riaz was a man of the old régime and as such a disbeliever in any but the most absolute forms of government, and he carried on the administration while in power according to the received methods which had prevailed in Ismaïl's time, by espionage, police rule, arrests, and deportations. But he was neither unjust nor personally cruel, and he was certainly animated throughout his public career by a real sense of patriotism. His idea in taking office under the joint control of the English and French Consulates, and the assistance he gave them in opposition to the popular will, was, as he has since assured me, simply to recover Egypt from its financial misfortunes and redeem the debt and so get rid as speedily as possible of the foreign intervention, nor is there any doubt that in the first year of his being in office great progress had been made in relieving the fellahin from their financial burdens. But the process of redemption must in any case have been a very slow one, and there is no probability that he would have succeeded either in freeing Egypt from the tutelage imposed on it or even of seeing the grosser evils of the administration which still weighed upon the people sensibly relieved. The régime of the Joint Control which Riaz served looked solely to finance and troubled itself hardly at all about other matters. The fellahin were still governed mainly by the kurbash, the courts of justice were abominably corrupt, the landed classes were universally in debt and were losing their lands to their creditors, and the alien caste of Turks and Circassians still lorded it over the whole country. There was no sign during the period of anything in the shape of moral improvement encouraged by the Government or even of improvement in the administrative system. This was the weak side of the Anglo-French régime and the cause of its failure to win popular favour. Nevertheless, it may be questioned whether the crisis would have come as speedily as it did, but for the Khedive's own insincerities and intrigues against his Minister. It was his character, as I have explained, to yield outwardly to pressure but at the same time to seek to regain his end by other means. Thus it happened that he had hardly taken Riaz to his counsels before he began to intrigue against him. He was jealous of his authority and grudged the power that he had given to his too independent Minister. This is the true history of the series of crises through which Egypt passed in 1881, including, to a large extent, the military troubles which ended in Riaz' fall from power.

The intervention of the army during the winter of 1880-81 as a political force in Egypt is so important a matter that it needs careful explanation. As an element of discontent, it may be said to date from the disastrous campaign in Abyssinia which destroyed in it the Khedivial prestige, and at the same time by the financial difficulties it had involved made the pay of the soldiers precarious and irregular. The men who returned from the campaign had no longer any respect for their generals who had shown themselves incompetent, and the subordinate officers for the most part made common cause against them with the men. This came about the more naturally because the higher posts in the army were occupied exclusively by the Turkish-speaking "Circassian" class which at that time monopolized official power, while the common soldiers and the officers to the rank of captain were almost as exclusively drawn from the Arabic-speaking fellahin population. The class feeling became strong when it was precisely these that were mulcted of their pay, while the Circassians continued to enjoy their much larger salaries undiminished. During the last three years, therefore, of Ismaïl's reign the rank and file of the army had fully shared the general discontent of the country, and there had been conspiracies, never made public, among the lower officers which at one moment very nearly came to the point of violent action. A leader in this class feeling in the army was, as early as 1877, Ahmed Bey Arabi, whose rank as lieutenant-colonel, a very unusual one to be held by a fellah, gave him a position of exceptional influence with his Arabic-speaking fellow countrymen. A short biography of this remarkable man will not be here out of place.

Arabi was born in 1840, the son of a small village sheykh, the owner of eight and a half acres of land, at Horiyeh, near Zagazig, where his family had been long established and enjoyed a certain local consideration of a semi-religious kind. Like many other village sheykhs they claimed a strain of Seyyid blood in their otherwise purely fellah lineage, and had a tradition of being, on that account, somewhat superior to their rustic neighbours. How far this claim was a valid one—and it has been disputed—I do not know, but it had at least the effect of giving them a desire for better religious education than is to be found in the Delta villages, and Arabi, like his father, was sent as a youth to Cairo and was a student there for two years at the Azhar. At the age of fourteen he was taken for a soldier, and as he was a tall, well-grown lad and Saïd Pasha, the then Viceroy, had a scheme for training the sons of village sheykhs as officers, he was pushed on through the lower ranks of the army, and at the early age of seventeen became lieutenant, captain at eighteen, major at nineteen, and Caimakam, lieutenant-colonel, at twenty. This rapid and unexampled advancement in the case of a fellah was due in part to the protection of the French general under whom he was serving, Suliman Pasha el Franzawi, but still more to the favour shown by the Viceroy, who affected to be, like the mass of his subjects, an Egyptian, not merely a member of the alien Turkish caste, and wished to have fellah officers about him. Arabi, a presentable young fellow, even so far enjoyed his favour as to be named his A. D. C., and in this capacity he accompanied Saïd to Medina the year before his death. It was during this close intercourse with the Viceroy that he acquired his first political ideas, which were those of equality as between class and class, and of the respect due to the fellah as the preponderating element in Egyptian nationality. It is this particular advocacy of fellah rights which distinguished Arabi from the other reformers of his day. The Azhar movement was one of general Mohammedan reform, without distinction of race. Arabi's was essentially a race movement and as such far more distinctly national and destined to be far more popular.

The unexpected death of his master, Saïd, was a great blow to Arabi's hopes. Under Ismaïl the favour shown to the fellah officers was withdrawn, and all preferment was once more given to the Circassians. Arabi found himself treated with scant courtesy by these, and was given only subordinate duties to perform in the transport service and semi-civilian posts. This threw him into the ranks of the discontented and made him more than ever the advocate of the rights of his own class. He was eloquent and able to expound his views in the sort of language his countrymen understood and appreciated, not very precise language perhaps, but illustrated with tropes and metaphors and texts from the Koran, which his Azhar education supplied. He thus exercised a considerable influence over those with whom he came in contact. During this period he came a good deal into the society of Europeans, especially at Alexandria, where he had been sent on business, not altogether military, connected with the Khedive's Daïra. His relations with these were friendly, and throughout his career he remained free from the least taint of fanatical intolerance in regard to Christians. On points of religion, though his practice was strict, he belonged to the largest and most liberal school of Mohammedan interpretation, and he was essentially a humanitarian in his ideas of the fraternity of nations and creeds. He knew no language, however, but his own, and maintained his integrity free from the European vices which are so easily acquired.

In the Abyssinian war Arabi saw some service, but only on the communication lines between Massawa and the front, and he returned from the campaign like all the rest, incensed at the way in which it had been mismanaged. It was this that turned his attention decidedly to politics and gave a wider scope to his indignation now principally directed against the Khedive. This was intensified when he found himself arrested, with another fellah officer, Ali Bey Roubi, on a false charge of having been concerned in the attack on Nubar, a manœuvre of Ismaïl's intended to screen his own part in the affair; and, after his release, he for a moment joined with others in a plan which, however, came to nothing, of deposing the Khedive. It is probable that, if Europe had not intervened when it did, this result would have ultimately happened, either through the action of the army or perhaps by Ismaïl's assassination, for such a solution too was at one time seriously discussed at the Azhar. All the Reforming party it is certain, and the soldiers with them, rejoiced at Ismaïl's downfall. It is a mistake also to suppose that Arabi was at the outset hostile to the new régime. Neither with Tewfik nor with the European Consuls had he the smallest quarrel. On the contrary, he saw in Tewfik a friendly influence, and in the Consuls protectors for the fellahin from their old oppressors. Moreover, he had obtained the command of a regiment of the guard, and was quartered where he would most have desired to be, in the Abbassiyeh barracks at Cairo. Had moderate prudence been used in dealing with the soldiers' very real grievances, and a War Minister less hostile to the fellah officers been appointed, there is every reason to believe that neither he nor any of his fellow officers would have thought of taking up an attitude hostile to the Government. Action in self defence was forced upon them, and for this the Khedive's jealousy of Riaz was mainly responsible.

The trouble came about in this way: when the new Ministry under Riaz was formed, Osman Rifky, a Turkish pasha of the old school, was made Minister of War. He was an extreme representative of the class which for centuries had looked upon Egypt as their property and the fellahin as their slaves and servants. His attitude, therefore, towards the fellah officers was from the first a hostile one, and in the appointments made by him it was to the Circassian, not the fellah, element in the army that preference was always given. The soldiers too were angry at being made use of for purposes outside their military duty, and subjected to a kind of corvée of hard labour such as the digging of canals and agricultural work on the Khedivial estates, to which they had become unaccustomed, and it was for taking their part and refusing to allow the men of his regiment to be ordered away to dig the Towfikiyeh Canal that Arabi first incurred the Minister's displeasure. There were questions too of pay withheld which called for redress, and on the 20th of May, 1880, a first petition was sent in by the fellah officers, of whom Arabi was one, setting forth their grievances.

The address included nothing political, and was made in proper form to the Ministry of War, and led, through the intervention of the French and English Consuls, to an official inquiry which proved the justice of the complaints. In this matter the French Consul, M. de Ring, took the part, as was just, of the officers, and from that time gave them to a certain extent his protection, especially when during the course of the Inquiry he had found himself in personal altercation with Riaz. Arabi in all this, while taking a leading part, was prudent and moderate, and his conduct was approved by the Consuls. Since his return to Cairo, as Colonel of the Fourth Regiment, he had renewed his acquaintance with the reformers of the Azhar and the Constitutional party, and through a mutual friend and Arabi's fellow officer Ali Bey Roubi, was in communication with two of the Ministers, Ali Pasha Mubarak and Mahmud Bey Sami. These, though Constitutionalists and adherents of Sherif Pasha, had retained their places as Ministers of Public Works and Religious Foundations (Awkaf) when Sherif had been dismissed. By Mahmud Sami, Arabi and the fellah officers were especially befriended.

It was in this conjuncture of affairs that the Khedive, seeing in it the elements of an intrigue against Riaz, put himself in communication with the officers through the intermediary of his A. D. C., Ali Bey Fehmi, an officer of fellah origin but attached through his Circassian wife to the Palace, and Colonel of the 1st regiment of the Guard. This Ali Fehmi was a very worthy young officer, and though he had not taken any part in the petition sent in to the Ministry and was without political bias, was already on friendly terms with Arabi and the rest, and had no difficulty in persuading them that the Khedive too was on their side in the quarrel, and had sent him to warn them that worse things were being designed against them by Osman Rifky and Riaz, and that unless they could procure the dismissal of these they would always be in danger. Arabi was the easier persuaded of this because Riaz had already had many of the Constitutionalists arrested, and some of these had been friends of his own. Sheykh Jemal-ed-din had been summarily dealt with, and a young landowner of the Sherkiyeh, Hassan Mousa el Akkad, a special friend of Arabi, had been deported only a short time before to the White Nile, for the mere reason that in response to an invitation publicly made by Sir Rivers Wilson he had petitioned against the Moukabalah confiscation. It was therefore suggested to the officers that they should be beforehand with Osman Rifky and should petition for his dismissal, a request which the Khedive would view favourably.

The affair came to a crisis about the end of the year 1880, when one evening, Arabi being with other officers at the house of Nejm el Din Pasha, he learned that it had been decided at the Ministry that he and his fellow Colonel of the Black Regiment, Abd-el-Aal Bey Helmi, were to be deprived of their commands and dismissed the service; and almost at the same time news was brought him that Ali Fehmi was at his own house and desired to see him. On returning home, therefore, he found Ali Fehmi waiting for him, and with him Abd-el-Aal who confirmed what he had heard, and after taking counsel it was decided that they should all three together—for Ali Fehmi expressed himself willing to throw in his lot with theirs—go to the Prime Minister and insist upon an end being put to their persecution by the dismissal of Osman Rifky; and this the next day they did. Arabi's own account given to me of their interview with Riaz is interesting and I have no doubt correct: "We went," he says, "with our petition to the Ministry of the Interior and asked to see Riaz. We were shown into an outer room and waited while the Minister read our document in the inner room. Presently he came out. 'Your petition,' he said, 'is muhlik, a hanging matter. What is it you want? to change the Ministry? And what would you put in its place? Whom do you propose to carry on the government?' And I answered him, 'Ya saat el Basha, is Egypt then a woman who has borne but eight sons and then become barren?' By this I meant himself and the seven Ministers under him. He was angry at this, but in the end said he would see into our affair, and so we left him."

At the Council of Ministers which assembled immediately after this incident the Khedive played a treacherous part. In order to involve the Ministry in an open quarrel with the officers, in which he knew the officers would have M. de Ring's protection, he proposed that they should be arrested and placed upon their trial by Court Martial, but to this Osman Rifky objected because he also would thus be put on trial, while Riaz was against making it a case of public scandal at all, and took the officers' part. It was pointed out however to Riaz privately that his opposition would be misinterpreted, and would be looked upon as an act disloyal to the Khedive, and he withdrew his opposition, and a compromise was come to according to which Osman Rifky was to be left to deal with the officers summarily, and according to methods common in Ismaïl's reign. No open action therefore was taken against the officers, and the case was left undecided by the Council.

What followed is well known. Some days later the three Colonels who had signed the petition received an invitation to attend at the Kasr el Nil Palace to arrange with the Minister what part their regiment should take in some festivities which were being organized for the Princess Jamila's wedding. Arrived there, they found a number of their superior officers, Circassians, with Osman Rifky, and were at once arrested, disarmed, and insulted. Arabi has always maintained that it was intended to put them on board a steamer which was lying in the river outside, and have them conveyed up the Nile and drowned; and I see no reason to doubt that this was the case. Osman Rifky's object was to avoid a trial, which would have exposed his own tyrannical proceedings, and it would doubtless have been reported that the officers had been dismissed the service and gone to their homes. Be this however as it may, they were speedily released by the soldiers of Ali Fehmi's regiment, who, under the command of their major, Mohammed Obeyd, a good and loyal man who was afterwards killed at Tel-el-Kebir, marched down on news being brought and forced the Palace doors. The Circassian Generals then beat a retreat as they best could, and Osman Rifky was forced to an undignified flight through a ground-floor window, whereupon the three Colonels marched back at the head of their troops, and with drums beating, to their barracks. Here they drew up a letter telling what had happened, and explaining that their action had been one of self-defence only, and in no way endangered the safety of any one, and addressed it to M. de Ring, begging his intercession with the Khedive, and that another Minister might be appointed in Osman Rifky's place, to which in the course of the day the Khedive readily acceded. It is certain, however, that he and M. de Ring together made a strong effort to get Riaz also dismissed, on the plea that as Prime Minister he was principally responsible for the disorder which had happened. Nevertheless Riaz was too strongly supported by the Financial Controllers and by the German Consul General, and, I think, by Malet, who was at that time, as I have recorded, by no means favourably disposed to the officers, and on the matter being referred to London and Paris the Khedive's wish was disregarded, and shortly after M. de Ring was recalled by his Government in disgrace.

The date of this first military disturbance at the Kasr el Nil was 1st February, 1881. It took place while I was still in Egypt, but after I had left Cairo, and I do not remember to have heard Arabi's name mentioned before it happened. The public part, however, that he played that brought him into immediate notoriety, and at once his name was in all men's mouths as that of a man who had been able successfully to defy the Government and bring about a change of Ministers. His position in a very few weeks became one of power in the country, or at least of imputed power, and, as the custom is in Egypt, petitions of all kinds poured in upon him from persons who had suffered wrong and who sought his aid to get justice. The fact that he had appeared in the affair as champion of fellah wrongs against the Turkish ruling class gave him popularity outside of Cairo, and many of the Notables and country sheykhs put themselves into communication with him. To all he returned what good answers he could and help as far as his limited power extended, and wherever men met him his fine presence, attractive smile, and dignified eloquence in conversation conveyed a favourable impression.

In personal appearance Arabi was at that time singularly well endowed for the part he was called upon to play in Egyptian history as representative of his race. A typical fellah, tall, heavy-limbed, and somewhat slow in his movements, he seemed to symbolize that massive bodily strength which is so characteristic of the laborious peasant of the Lower Nile. He had nothing in him of the alertness of a soldier, and there was a certain deliberation in his gesture which gave him the dignity one so often sees in village sheykhs. His features in repose were dull, and his eyes had an abstracted look like those of a dreamer, and it was only when he smiled and spoke that one saw the kindly and large intelligence within. Then his face became illumined as a dull landscape by the sun. To Turkish and Circassian pashas this type of man seemed wholly negligible, that of the peasant boor they had for generations dominated and held in slavery and forced to labour for them without pay, and it seemed impossible to them he should be used otherwise than as a tool in their astute hands. Riaz from first to last despised him, and even the intellectual Reformers of the Azhar took little count of him as a political force. But with his own peasant class his rusticity was all in his favour. He was one of themselves, they perceived, but with their special qualities intensified and made glorious by the power they credited him with, and by the semi-religious culture he had acquired at the Azhar superior to their own. It must be remembered that in all Egyptian history, for at least three hundred years, no mere fellah had ever risen to a position of any political eminence in Egypt, or had appeared in the light of a reformer, or whispered a word of possible revolt. I doubt, however, whether his qualities alone, which were after all rather negative ones, or his talents, of which he had as yet given no proof, would have sufficed to bring him to the front as a National leader, but for the unwise persecution to which he was subjected by Riaz in the months following the affair of Kasr el Nil, and which, through the intrigues of the Minister's political enemies, he was always able to thwart and circumvent. The most important of these, and the man in the best position to warn him of his dangers was the new Minister of War, Mahmud Bey Sami, who, through M. de Ring's influence, had been given Osman Rifky's succession, and who, as one of the ex-Minister Sherif's party, was a strong Constitutionalist. Though not personally acquainted with Arabi hitherto, he had already been friendly disposed towards him, and with one of the fellah officers, Ali Bey Roubi, he was on terms of intimacy. Having become Minister of War, he was in a position to help them actively, and to give them notice of designs against them such as came to his ears; and he was able to do this the more effectively because he still saw little of Arabi personally, though remaining in touch with him through Ali Roubi. He had made the officers a general promise that if at any time the Khedive joined actively against them they would know it, even if he did not warn them directly, by his retirement from the Ministry.

Mahmud Samiel Barodi's part in the revolution of that year was a determining one in the course it took. Of a Circassian family long established in the country, and so of the traditional ruling class, he was, like Sherif Pasha, a reformer and a patriot. Intellectually, he was far superior to Arabi, and was indeed one of the most cultivated intelligences in Egypt, with a good knowledge of literature, both Arabic and Turkish, and especially of Egyptian history, besides being an elegant and distinguished poet. English writers, following the lead, or mislead, of the Blue Books, talk of him only as an intriguer, but he was something much more than this, and it must be remembered that in intriguing, as he undoubtedly did here against Riaz, he acted against a Minister who was of a different party from his own, and whom he had not elected to serve. At the time Riaz took office in 1879, Mahmud Sami was already in the Ministry, and there had been an understanding that he and Ali Mubarak, who were Constitutionalists, should remain on an independent footing as far as their own departments were concerned. In the spring of 1881 they were both undoubtedly intriguing against Riaz, but it was with the object of restoring their own party chief Sherif Pasha, to power. This puts a different complexion upon Mahmud Sami's action, and I fancy might find many a parallel in the annals of our own English Cabinets. His part, as I see it, throughout the troubles that were coming was a perfectly loyal one, both to the Constitutional and the National cause, and he paid dearer for his constancy, for he was a rich man and so had more to lose, than any other concerned in the rebellion.

The Khedive's part in the next seven months was far less straightforward. He seems throughout to have been torn with irresolutions, jealousies, fears, and ambitions. Riaz' enemies had suggested to him that that masterful Minister was plotting against him to supplant him as Khedive, an altogether absurd suspicion which he nevertheless at times gave ear to. At other times Arabi's growing popularity aroused his jealousy, and he was constantly shifting from one dread to the other, while his ambition was to regain his own or rather his father's lost authority. The Anglo-French control irked him sorely, and he knew that by the bulk of his subjects he was disliked and despised. His Circassian entourage, the men of his Court, were all violent against the fellah officers and were constantly urging him to take strong measures against them, while Sherif Pasha and the Constitutionalists were for his making use of them on the lines already attempted to get rid of Riaz and the Consular subjection in which he lay, by another military demonstration. Such was the state of things in the month of August when the general ferment in the Mohammedan world, caused by the French invasion of Tunis, brought matters at Cairo to a definite crisis.

[CHAPTER VII]
TRIUMPH OF THE REFORMERS IN EGYPT

It is difficult to determine the precise part played by the Khedive in the final act of the revolutionary drama, the military demonstration of the 9th September at Abdin Palace. According to Ninet and certain other writers there was a complete pre-arrangement and community of action between Tewfik that day and the military leaders with the object of bringing about the fall of Riaz and with it of the Consular tutelage in which Tewfik found himself enmeshed. But this is only true in a general sense. Arabi himself has always assured me that during the summer of 1881 he had no personal relations with the Khedive beyond those official ones which his service as colonel of one of the guard regiments entailed. He only on three occasions had speech with His Highness, and on these no political subject was touched on between them. At the same time it is quite certain that the idea of a demonstration with the objects named had been suggested from time to time during the summer by Tewfik to the officers through the intermediary of his A. D. C., Ali Fehmi. Ali Fehmi, though he had been concerned with Arabi in the affairs of the Kasr-el-Nil and had been arrested with him, was none the less received back into the Khedive's favour, who thought to make use of him still in the double capacity of spy on the fellah officers and intermediary, if he required it, with them. Ali Fehmi's connection with the Court through his marriage seemed to Tewfik a guarantee of his fidelity, and it was on account of his ultimately siding entirely with Arabi, notwithstanding his Court connection, that Tewfik's resentment was afterwards so bitter against him. Tewfik, however, was a man, as we have seen him, of varying moods, and while he still counted on the help of the army to rid himself of Riaz he was also swayed by occasional fits of jealousy of Arabi's rapidly growing popularity. This popularity was very marked all through the summer months and brought him into communication with innumerable country sheykhs and Notables to whom the idea of fellah emancipation which he preached was naturally congenial. He began to be talked of in the provinces as "el wahhíd" the "only one," and in truth he deserved the appellation, for he was the only man of purely fellah origin who had for centuries been able to resist successfully the tyranny of the reigning Turco-Circassian caste.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the National movement of 1881 was essentially a fellah movement, having for its object the emancipation of the fellahin, and that it was directed primarily against the iniquitous Turkish Government, which had ruined the country, and only incidentally against the Anglo-French control when this last declared itself openly the ally and supporter of that tyranny. Other interests, however, naturally joined in with the movement; and besides being sought out by the fellah Notables, Arabi soon found himself approached as an ally by the professed Constitutionalists, many of whom were members of the ruling caste, and were at heart as much opposed to fellah liberty as was Riaz himself. The idea of a Constitution in the minds of men of this class was one in which the supreme power, though taken from the Khedive, should remain in the hands of the Turco-Circassian oligarchy, the only ones they considered capable of governing the country. The chief of these Turkish Constitutionalists was Sherif Pasha, and the course of the summer found him in indirect but close correspondence with Arabi as the means of bringing about the Constitution which should be the road for him to a resumption of office. Arabi, always sympathetic to the Constitutional plan, lent himself readily to the idea, and the more so because Sultan Pasha, the most powerful of the fellah Notables, was himself a strong Constitutionalist, and acted as intermediary between him and Sherif. It was arranged between them all that, when a favourable moment should occur, Arabi should add the weight of the army's influence to any pressure that it might be necessary to bring to bear upon the Khedive to obtain his consent to the Constitutional demand. Nor was the Khedive by any means averse from the thing demanded, as it necessarily included the dismissal of Riaz, an object still to him of prime importance; and, at the time when this feeling predominated in his mind, he, through Ali Fehmi, encouraged Arabi to go forward with his plan and assured him of his approval.

The first message received by Arabi in this sense was one very characteristic of Tewfik's indirect and timid methods of intrigue. Speaking one day with Ali Fehmi about the growing power of the army as a political influence, he said: "You three, Arabi, Abd-el-Aal, and yourself, are three soldiers—with me you make four." And he bade him deliver this declaration as a message to Arabi. It was followed by hints far more direct, so that it was soon accepted as certain that any demonstration that might be made by the army which should demand Riaz' dismissal would have the Khedive's secret approval if not his open favour. It was necessary, in order to put constraint upon the Consuls, that the Khedive should seem to yield to a physical necessity when consenting to a change of Ministers.

Nevertheless, when the moment for action actually arrived, it was far from certain what line the Khedive would take. The crisis came about in this way. In the month of August Riaz Pasha, who up to then had despised the fellah movement too completely to think it at all dangerous, became for the first time alarmed. The part in it played by the soldiers he had thought to be able to cope with by some of those irregular methods which are the time-honoured tradition of Turkish Government. He had beset Arabi and his fellow colonels with spies and had sought constantly to involve them through the police in some personal quarrel or street disturbance which should put them in his power, but always in vain. The soldiers invariably received warning of any serious design through their friend at the War Office, Mahmud Sami, and were constantly on their guard. It had been arranged, too, between Mahmud Sami and Arabi that if ever the Minister should be forced to retire from the War Office, it would be a sign to the fellah officers that they must expect the worst, even if they should hear nothing of it from himself. When, therefore, in August Riaz, losing patience, quarrelled with the War Minister and it was announced that Mahmud Sami had resigned, the officers saw that the moment for action, as far as they were themselves concerned, could not long be delayed. Riaz had insisted with Mahmud Sami on the banishment of the two leading colonels with their regiments from Cairo and had got the Khedive, in one of his fits of jealousy at Arabi's popularity, to go with him in ordering it, and when Mahmud Sami demurred, his dismissal had been summarily announced to him. The Khedive and Riaz were at the time away still for the summer season at Alexandria, and Mahmud Sami, in his disgrace, had been ordered by letter to leave Cairo at once for his village, and so had not had time to communicate with his military friends. These, nevertheless, knew that trouble was in store for them, and it was the more apparent because Mahmud Sami's successor was no other than a certain Circassian general of the worst reactionary type, Daoud Pasha Yeghen, the Khedive's brother-in-law, whom they knew to be especially their enemy. In the first days of September the Court returned to Cairo, and the colonels, having taken counsel only with Sultan Pasha and their most intimate civilian allies, prepared for immediate action. They were resolved that, which way soever the Khedive might now be inclined towards them, they would carry out the projected demonstration and insist on a change of Ministry as a guarantee of their personal security. They saw plainly enough that if they allowed themselves to be separated from each other and removed from Cairo it would be an easy matter for Riaz to ruin them in detail. The least they might expect at his hands would be dismissal from the service, and it was far more likely that they would be arrested and tried for mutiny in connection with their doings in February. It was part, too, of their program to obtain an increase of the army, and they added to it a demand of the Constitution, which seemed to all the only permanent guarantee against arbitrary government.

The crisis came suddenly on the 8th of September. Daoud Pasha, who like most men of his class held the fellah officers in supreme contempt and who anticipated no resistance from them, issued his order for the departure of the two regiments, Arabi's to Alexandria and Abd-el-Aal's to Damietta, and on receiving it the colonels decided upon instant action. That they counted upon the Khedive's tolerance, if not his sympathy, is certain, and they knew his weak character too well to doubt that, whatever he might have resolved on in counsel with Riaz the day before, on the day of trial he would be found on the side of the strongest battalions. All they were in any real anxiety about was the attitude of Ali Fehmi, though on him too they counted as almost certainly a friend. Ali Fehmi and his regiment, the first of the guard, had been excepted from the Ministerial order of removal from Cairo, and was still quartered at Abdin barracks, and if the Khedive was really hostile to them, and Ali obedient to orders, the result might be a conflict. Otherwise the demonstration had all the probability of being a pacific one. In order, however, to minimize the risk of a misunderstanding they sent word in writing to the Khedive apprising him of their plans, and as a proof that there was no hostility intended to himself declared that they would not march to his residence in the Ismaïlyeh quarter but to Abdin, the official palace, and begged him there to meet them and hear their complaints.

The rest may be best told in Arabi's own words: "The next morning," he says in his most complete account of the affair, "I wrote a letter stating our demands and sent it to the Khedive at Ismaïlyeh Palace saying that we should march to Abdin Palace at the Asr (mid-afternoon) there to receive his answer. And the reason of our going to Abdin, and not to Ismaïlyeh where he lived, was that Abdin was his public residence, and we did not wish to alarm the ladies of his household. But if he had not come to Abdin we should have marched on to Ismaïlyeh. When, therefore, the Khedive received our message he sent for Riaz Pasha and Khairi Pasha and Stone Pasha (the American), and they went first to Abdin barracks, where both the Khedive and Riaz Pasha spoke to the soldiers, and they gave orders to Ali Fehmi that he should, with his regiment, occupy the palace of Abdin. And Ali Fehmi assented, and he posted his men in the upper rooms out of sight, so that they should be ready to fire at us from the windows. But I do not know whether they were given ball cartridge or not. Then the Khedive, with the Generals, went on to the Kaláa (citadel), and they spoke to the soldiers there in the same sense, calling on Fuda Bey to support the Khedive against us, the Khedive scolding him and threatening 'I shall put you in prison.' But the soldiers surrounded the carriage, and the Khedive was afraid and drove away. And he went on by the advice of Riaz to Abbassiyeh to speak to me. But I had already marched with my regiment by the Hassaniyeh quarter to Abdin. And they stopped to ask about the artillery and were told that it also had gone to Abdin.

"And when the Khedive arrived at Abdin he found us occupying the square, the artillery and cavalry being before the west entrance and I with my troops before the main entrance. And already when I arrived before the Palace I had sent to Ali Fehmi who, I had heard, was there and had spoken with him and he had withdrawn his men from the Palace, and they and Ali Fehmi stood with us. And the Khedive entered by the back door on the east side, and presently he came out to us with his Generals and aides-de-camp, but I did not see Colvin with him though he may have been there. And the Khedive called on me to dismount and I dismounted. And he called on me to put up my sword, and I put up my sword; but the officers, my friends, approached with me to prevent treachery, about fifty in number, and some of them placed themselves between him and the palace. And, when I had delivered my message and made my three demands to the Khedive, he said 'I am Khedive of the country and I shall do as I please' (in the Egyptian patois) 'ana Khedeywi el beled, wa amal zay ma inni awze.' I replied, 'We are not slaves and shall never from this day forth be inherited' (nahnu ma abid, wa la nurithu bad el yom). That is to say, 'We shall never be, as slaves are, subject to being bequeathed by will from one master to another.' He said nothing more, but turned and went back into the palace. And presently they sent out Cookson to me with an interpreter, and he asked why, being a soldier, I made demand of a parliament. And I said that it was to put an end to arbitrary rule, and I pointed to the crowd of citizens supporting us behind the soldiers. Then he threatened me, saying 'But we will bring a British army'; and much discussion took place between us. And he returned six or seven times to the palace, and came out again six or seven times to me, until finally he informed me that the Khedive had agreed to all. And the Khedive mentioned Haidar Pasha to replace Riaz, but I would not consent. And when it was put to me to say it, I named Sherif Pasha, because he had declared himself in favour of a Mejliss-el Nawwab, Council of Notables. I had known Sherif a little in former years when he was serving in the army. And the same evening the Khedive sent for me, and I went to him at the Ismaïlia Palace, and I thanked him for having agreed to our requests, but he said only: 'That is enough, go now and occupy Abdin, but let it be without music in the streets.'"

This seems to me a very straightforward account and agrees with everything else that I have been able to learn about the events of the day from native evidence, and even in a general way with the Blue Books. The Khedive's part in it was, according to its showing, hardly heroic, but it was less a case with him of physical cowardice than the English official account suggests. He knew perfectly well that he ran no danger from the soldiers, nor was there anything they had asked of him that he was not quite willing to grant or at least to promise. He stood, as they say, to win in either event, and was in the secret of much that, to Cookson and Colvin, was altogether a mystery.

These two Englishmen, mentioned by Arabi, were respectively Sir Charles Cookson, the British Consul at Alexandria temporarily in charge of the English Agency in Malet's absence on leave at Cairo, and Sir Auckland Colvin, the English Financial Controller. They were almost the sole representatives of the Foreign official body then in Egypt—for M. de Sinkiewicz, the new French Minister, had not yet arrived, and M. de Blignières, Colvin's French colleague, was also away. They had, therefore, the leading part to play in advising the Khedive and reporting the matter home. Colvin, an Indian official with the traditions of the Anglo-Indian art of government, and being quite unsuspicious of the semi-understanding there was between Tewfik and the officers, was all for violent measures, and recommended that the Khedive should adopt such an attitude towards them as might have been taken successfully by Mohammed Ali sixty years before, but was quite unsuited to the actual circumstances. His advice was that he should without more than a short parley shoot Arabi with a pistol with his own hand. Cookson, who knew Tewfik's timidity better, though he also was ignorant of his partial collusion with the officers, was for compromise, and effected precisely that solution which Tewfik had schemed so long to obtain, namely, the dismissal of Riaz and the recall of Sherif. His account of the affair may be read with profit in the Blue Books, as also Colvin's narrative of it in the "Times," to which he communicated the account published, and in the "Pall Mall Gazette," of which he was the regular correspondent. The publicity thus given to their action gained the thanks of the English Government for both officials, and for Colvin the honour of a knighthood and a political position in Egypt he did not till that time possess. And so the matter ended. Riaz, who with the recollection of Nubar's and Osman Rifky's adventures had taken no part in the discussion with the soldiers but had remained prudently inside the Palace, received that evening his dismissal and retired to Alexandria and thence to Europe to remain there till help should come to him from the protecting Powers; and Sherif Pasha, after some show of reluctance, was installed Prime Minister in his stead. All Egypt woke next morning to learn that not merely a revolt but a revolution had been effected, and that the long reign of arbitrary rule was, as it hoped, for ever at an end. The Khedive had promised to assemble the Notables and grant a Constitution, and henceforth the land of the Pharaohs and the Mamelukes and the Turkish Pashas was to be ruled according to the laws of justice and administered not by aliens but by the representatives of the Egyptian people themselves.

The three months which followed this notable event were the happiest time, politically, that Egypt has ever known. I am glad that I had the privilege of witnessing it with my own eyes and so that I know it not merely by hearsay, or I should doubt its reality, so little like was it to anything that I had hitherto seen or am likely, I fear, ever to see again. All native parties and, for the moment, the whole population of Cairo were united in the realization of a great national idea, the Khedive no less it seemed than the rest. He was delighted, now the crisis was over, in the success of his plot for getting rid of Riaz, and with him the most irksome features of the Dual Control, and he trusted in Sherif to rid him sooner or later of Arabi. Sherif and the Turkish liberal magnates were no less elated at their return to power, and even the reactionary Turks, who were by no means at one with Riaz, shared in what they considered a triumph against Europe. The soldiers were relieved of the incubus of danger which had so long weighed on them, and the civilian reformers rejoiced at the civil liberties they now looked on as assured. Those who had most doubted and held back longest acknowledged that the appeal to force with its bloodless victory had been justified by results. Throughout Egypt a cry of jubilation arose such as for hundreds of years had not been heard upon the Nile, and it is literally true that in the streets of Cairo men stopped each other, though strangers, to embrace and rejoice together at the astonishing new reign of liberty which had suddenly begun for them, like the dawn of day after a long night of fear. The Press, under Sheykh Mohammed Abdu's enlightened censorship, freed more than ever from its old trammels, spread the news rapidly, and men at last could meet and speak fearlessly everywhere in the provinces without the dread of spies or of police interference. All classes were infected with the same happy spirit, Moslems, Christians, Jews, men of all religions and all races, including not a few Europeans of those at all intimately connected with native life. Even the foreign Consuls could not but confess that the new régime was better than the old, that Riaz had made mistakes, and that Arabi, if he had not been wholly right, had at least not been wholly wrong.

Arabi's attitude both towards the Khedive and towards the new Ministers was correct and dignified. He had several interviews with Tewfik which, at any rate on Arabi's side, were of a most cordial character, while with the Sherif and Mahmud Sami (restored as Minister of War) he showed himself perfectly willing, now his work was done and the liberty of the country obtained, to stand aside and leave its development to his civilian friends. All his speeches of that time—and some of them are to be read in the Blue Books—are in this reasonable sense and reveal him as deeply imbued with those lofty and romantic humanitarian views which were a leading feature of his political career. There is not a trace in them of anything but a large-minded sympathy with men of all classes and creeds, nor is it possible to detect unfriendliness even to the European financial control whose beneficial influence on Egypt he, on the contrary, cheerfully acknowledges. The old régime of Turkish absolutism is past and done with—that is the theme of most of the speeches—and a new era of national freedom, peace, and goodwill to all men has begun. On the 2nd of October, a fortnight after Sherif's installation at the Ministry, we find Arabi leaving Cairo with his regiment for Ras-el-Wady amid the universal enthusiasm of a grateful city.

There was only one cloud at that date visible on the Egyptian horizon, the possible hostility of the Sultan to the idea of a Constitution. Abdul Hamid, after playing for a while with Constitutionalism at Constantinople, had shown himself at last its implacable enemy, and that very summer had ordered the mock trial and condemnation of Midhat, its most prominent advocate. The appearance, therefore, of a Special Commission at Cairo early in October representing the Sultan and instructed to inquire into what was happening in Egypt disturbed, to a certain extent, men's minds, and doubtless hastened the departure both of Arabi to Ras-el-Wady and of Abd-el-Aal to Damietta. The visit, however, of the Commissioners passed off quietly. The new Ministers were able to explain that in the political movement which was now avowedly a national one, no disloyalty was intended to the Sultan. On the contrary, the fate of Tunis had convinced the Egyptians that their only safety from European aggression lay in strengthening, not loosening, the link which bound them to the Ottoman Empire, and that in reality the object of the Revolution had been to prevent further encroachments by the Financial Control of France and England on Egypt's political independence. All was for the best, and the country was now content and pacified. Ali Pasha Nizami, the chief commissioner, was consequently able to take back with him a favourable report of the situation, and this was strengthened by the second commissioner, Ahmed Pasha Ratib, who had an opportunity of personal talk with Arabi on his way to Suez and Mecca.

This interview, which had important consequences later for the growth of the political situation, took place in the train between Zagazig and Tel-el-Kebir, Arabi had assured me on his part an accidental one, he having gone to Zagazig to visit his friends Ahmed Eff. Shemsi and Suliman Pasha Abaza and being on his way home. "As I was returning," he has told me, "by train to Ras-el-Wady it happened that Ahmed Pasha Ratib was on his way to Suez, for he was going on to Mecca on pilgrimage. And I found myself in the same carriage with him, and we exchanged compliments as strangers, and I asked him his name and he asked me my name, and he told me of his pilgrimage and other things. But he did not speak of his mission to the Khedive, nor did I ask. But I told him I was loyal to the Sultan as the head of our religion, and I also related to him all that had occurred, and he said, 'You did well.' And at Ras-el-Wady I left him, and he sent me a Koran from Jeddah, and later, on his return to Stamboul, he wrote to me, saying that he had spoken favourably of me to the Sultan, and finally I received the letter dictated by the Sultan to Sheykh Mohammed Zaffer telling me the things you know of." The Ottoman Commission therefore passed off without leading to any immediate trouble. It was coincident with the arrival at Alexandria of a French and an English gunboat, which had been ordered there by the two Governments at the moment of receiving the news of the demonstration at Abdin; and the gunboats and the commissioners left on the same day in October. Malet by this time had returned to his post, and so had Sinkiewicz, and it was agreed between them that the situation needed no active intervention. Malet indeed wrote at that time in the most favourable terms to his Government both of the new Ministers and of Arabi, whose honesty and patriotism, though he had had no personal communication with him, he was now inclined to believe in.

It was at this junction of affairs in Egypt that early in November I returned to Cairo. I had had no recent news from my Azhar friends, and was ignorant of what had happened there during the summer beyond what all the world knew, and it was not even my intention when leaving London to do more than pass through the Suez Canal on my way back (for such was again my plan for the winter) to Arabia. I had been deeply interested in the crisis which was being witnessed throughout the Mohammedan world, and I still hoped to be able to take some personal part in the great events I saw impending—I hardly knew what, except that it should be as a helper in the cause of Arabian and Mohammedan liberty. When the revolt took place in Algeria in connection with the French aggression on Tunis, I had written to my friend Seyyid Mohammed Abd-el-Kader at Damascus asking him for an introduction to its leader, Abu Yemama, but this he had not been able to give, and I had also tried in vain to discover Sheykh Jemal-ed-din Afghani's whereabouts in America, where, after wandering two years in India, he was said to be, and now my thoughts were once more turned to Arabia which I had come to look upon as a sacred land, the cradle of Eastern liberty and true religion. Strangely enough, I did not suspect that in the National movement in Egypt the chief interest for me in Islam already lay, as it were, close to my hand, and it was a mere accident that determined my taking any part in what was coming there, even as a spectator.

The reason for my blindness and indifference was that in England the events of September had been represented in the Press as purely military, and even at the Foreign Office there was no knowledge of their true significance. I share with most lovers of liberty a distrust of professional soldiers as the champions of any cause not that of tyranny, and I found it difficult to believe, even as far as Malet did, that Arabi had an honest purpose in what he had done. I knew also that Sheykh Mohammed Abdu and the rest of my Azhar friends were for other methods than those of violence, and that the reforms they had so long been preaching would in their opinion take a lifetime to achieve. It seemed impossible to understand that the events of a single summer should have brought them already to maturity. As to the promised Constitution, the London Press declared that it was mere talk, a pretext of the kind that the ex-Khedive Ismaïl had made use of against Wilson, and Malet was reported to have declared that it would remain a promise only because the Sultan whom he had seen at Constantinople on his way back to Egypt would never allow it.

The Ottoman Commission added to my distrust of the whole movement and the fact that Arabi had demanded an increase of the army to the number of 18,000 men. These were the common views of the day in England and I had no special knowledge in correction of them. I remember shortly before leaving London, that when I called on my cousin Philip Currie at the Foreign Office, he surprised me by expressing an opinion that perhaps there was something more in the National Movement in Egypt than appeared on the surface. "Malet," he said, "is rather inclined now to believe in it. I wonder you do not go there. Perhaps you might find in Arabi just the man you have been looking for." He knew of course my ideas, which he had never taken quite seriously or as more than a romantic fancy, and his words were lightly spoken and we laughed together without discussion. Yet afterwards I recalled them to memory and wondered that I had been so little responsive. My thoughts, however, were fixed elsewhere.

It is worth recording that the night before I started I entertained at dinner at the Travellers' Club three of my then rather intimate friends, John Morley, who had recently become editor of the "Pall Mall Gazette" besides being editor of the "Fortnightly Review," Sir Alfred Lyall, and our Consul at Jeddah, Zohrab. With these I had a long talk about Mohammedan and Eastern affairs, and it was agreed between me and Morley that, if I found the champion of Arabian reform that I was seeking, I should let him know and he would do his best to put his claims prominently before the English public. Morley was not as yet in Parliament, but he already held a position of high influence with the Government through his personal connection with Chamberlain; his paper, the "Pall Mall," was one of the few Mr. Gladstone read, the only one, I believe, in the soundness of whose views he had any confidence. It was a pleasant dinner and we all took rather enthusiastic views as to the possibilities of the future of Islam. On the subject of Egypt, however, Morley was unfortunately already under other influences than mine. His correspondent for the "Pall Mall Gazette" was no other than the Financial Controller, Sir Auckland Colvin, and so it happened that when the crisis came in the spring he was found, contrary to what might have been expected of him, on the English official and financial side, and one of the strongest advocates of violent measures for the suppression of liberty.

On my way to Egypt an incident occurred which I shall have to return to when its full importance comes to be considered. At Charing Cross Station I found Dilke and his private secretary, Austin Lee, on their way, as I was, to Paris, and I made the whole journey in their company. Dilke that day was in the highest possible spirits. His intimate friend Gambetta had just, 15th November, succeeded St. Hilaire as French Prime Minister; and Dilke, who had been for the last six months the English Commissioner at Paris for the negotiation of a renewal of the Commercial Treaty with France without having succeeded in concluding it, was now returning to his work confident that with the change at the Quai d'Orsay he should no longer have any difficulty. Gambetta, on his side, had a plan of his own in which Dilke as Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office could be of the greatest use to him. St. Hilaire had made a terrible mess of the Tunis invasion and had left all North Africa in a blaze for his successor to deal with. Gambetta had come into office determined to use strong measures, and, as they say, to "grasp the nettle" with both hands. He was filled with apprehension of a general Pan-Islamic rising, and saw in the National movement at Cairo only a new and dangerous manifestation of Moslem "fanaticism." He was closely connected, too, through his Jewish origin with the great financial interests involved in Egypt, and had made up his mind to better St. Hilaire's halting aggression on Tunis by forcing our intervention also in Egypt. In this he wanted our Government to go with him and join in an anti-Islamic crusade in the name of civilization, and as a first measure to strengthen the hold of the European Joint Control at Cairo. On both these matters, the Commercial Treaty and Egypt, Dilke was most communicative, though he did not put all the dots upon the i's, treating the former as a special English interest, the latter as specially a French one. It was a point of party honour with the Liberal Government, which was essentially a Free Trade Government, to show the world that their Free Trade declarations did not prevent them from getting reciprocity from other nations, or favorable commercial terms from protectionist governments, and Dilke knew that it would be a feather in his cap if he could obtain a renewal of the French concessions. So eager indeed was he about it that I distinctly remember saying to myself, half aloud, as we parted at the Gare du Nord: "That man means to sell Egypt for his Commercial Treaty." Nor did the event prove it otherwise than exactly a true prophecy. It will be seen a little later that to the trivial advantage of obtaining certain small reductions of the import duties levied on English goods in France, the whole issue of liberty in Egypt, and to a large extent of Mohammedan reform throughout the world, was sacrificed by our Liberal Government. But of all this in its place.

My going at all to Cairo that winter was, as I have explained, somewhat fortuitous, providential I might almost say, if I was not afraid of giving my personal action in Egypt too much importance and too high a meaning. The ship which was to bring me out my servants and camp equipage, after nearly foundering in the Bay of Biscay, ran aground in the Canal and I was obliged to wait at Suez. I left it for Cairo, meaning to be there for a few days only. It had been reported in England that the Azhar Ulema had been won back from their ideas of reform and had adopted the Sultan's reactionary Pan-Islamic views. Half distrustful of the result, I sent a message to my first friend, at the University, Sheykh Mohammed Khalil, and then another curious accident occurred. In answer to my note begging him to come and see me at the Hôtel du Nil, where I had alighted, behold, instead of the young Alem whom I knew so well, another Azhar Sheykh of the same name, Sheykh Mohammed Khalil el Hajrasi, a perfect stranger who greeted me with a stranger's welcome. The newcomer had received my message, and, thinking it had come from a European merchant with whom he had dealings in connection with his native village in the Sherkieh, had followed close upon the heels of the messenger. This Mohammed el Hajrasi, though a man of less intrinsic worth than my real friend, was a person of some importance at the Azhar, and proved to be perhaps of even more interest to me at the moment than the other could have been from the fact that he was intimate with the chiefs of what was then called the military party at Cairo and was personally acquainted with Arabi. This my own Mohammed Khalil was not, and, as I presently found, neither he nor his chief Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, would have served me as an intermediary with these, for, as already said, they had disapproved of the immixture of the army in political affairs in September and, though rejoicing at the result, were still to a certain extent holding aloof. Hajrasi, however, when he had recovered from his surprise at finding me an Englishman and not the man he had expected, was nothing loath to talk of Arabi and his doings, and when I went on to explain my views to him of reform upon an Arab basis he at once became confidential and explained to me his own views which were not very different from mine. He was one of the principal Sheykhs, he told me, of the Shafeite rite, and had close relations with the Liberal party of reform at Mecca, who were then in avowed opposition to Abdul Hamid and were looking forward to a new Arabian Caliphate. This was a great point of sympathy between us, and it was not long before we had made a full exchange of our ideas; and I think no better proof could be given of the wonderful liberty of thought and speech which marked those days in Egypt than that this eminent religious Sheykh, who certainly a year before would have locked his secrets jealously in his bosom, even perhaps from a friend, should suddenly have thus unloosened his tongue in eloquent response to my questions and should have unfolded to me, a European and a complete stranger, his most dangerous aspirations in politics. It no doubt, however, was in some part due to the presence with me of my learned Arabic professor, Sabunji, whom I had had the happy inspiration to bring with me from London to help out my poor resources of that language.

It was thus from Hajrasi that I first learned the details of what had been going on at Cairo during the summer and the true position of the soldiers in regard to the National Party, facts which I soon after had confirmed to me from a number of other sources including my original friends, Mohammed Khalil and Mohammed Abdu. Sabunji, moreover, who had a real genius for this kind of work, was presently busy all the city over seeking out news for me, so that in a very few days we knew between us pretty nearly everything that was going on. Nor were we long before we had made acquaintance with some of the fellah officers who had taken part with Arabi in the demonstration, especially with Eïd Diab and Ali Fehmi, with whom I was pleasantly impressed. The matters being principally discussed at the moment were, first, the character of the Khedive—was he to be trusted, or was he not, to fulfil the promises he had given? He had promised a Constitution, but was this to be a real transfer of power to Ministers responsible to a Representative Chamber, or only the summoning of a Chamber of Notables with common consultative powers? Tewfik was mistrusted on this point, and it was generally believed that he was being advised to shuffle in this way out of his engagement by Malet who, as already said, had just come from Constantinople and had declared that the Sultan would never agree to real Constitutional government.

The more advanced section of the Nationalists were bitter against the whole house of Mohammed Ali and especially of the branch of it to which Tewfik belonged, his father Ismaïl and his grandfather Ibrahim, a cruel and treacherous race which had brought untold woes upon the fellahin and had ruined the country morally and financially, and had, by their misconduct, brought about foreign intervention. Secondly, there was the question of reforms. Now that the Press was free, attacks were beginning to be made upon various gross abuses, the injustice of the taxation which, under the foreign Financial Control, favoured Europeans at the expense of the native population; of the unnecessary multiplication of highly paid offices held by foreigners, French and English; of the hold obtained by these over the railway administration and the administration of the domains which had passed into the hands of representatives of the Rothschilds; of the scandal of £9,000 a year subvention being granted still, in spite of the poverty of the land, to the European Opera House at Cairo. A campaign was being carried on, especially by the "Taif" newspaper, edited by a hot-headed young man of genius, Abdallah Nadim, against the brothels and wine-shops and disreputable cafés chantants which under protection of the "Capitulations" had invaded Cairo to the grief and anger of pious Moslems. There was an echo, too, of the bitterness felt by all Mohammedans just then on account of the French raid in Tunis where it was affirmed that mosques had been profaned and Moslem women outraged. Nevertheless the feeling at Cairo between native Christian and native Mohammedan was altogether friendly. The Copts were as a rule wholly with the revolution, and their Patriarch was on the best of terms with the Ministry of which Butros Pasha was a prominent and respected member. Even the native Jews with their Chief Rabbi were all for the Constitutional reform. With the officers the point of principal concern was naturally that of the promised increase of the army, which they affirmed was necessary in view of what had taken place in Tunis, where the Bey had been found quite unprepared with a military force sufficient to defend his country. The legal maximum allowed by the Sultan's Firman in Egypt was 18,000 men and the army must be raised to that point.

My earliest intervention in the affairs of the Nationalists of any active kind came about in this way. About the end of November my friend Sheykh Mohammed el Hajrasi informed me of an agitation which was going on among the students of the Azhar, especially those of the Shafeite and Malekite rites, to depose the actual Sheykh el Islam, or as he is more generally called, Sheykh el Jama, the head of the Hanefite rite, Mohammed el Abbasi. The reason given me for this was that, as a nominee of the Khedive, he could not be relied on to give an honest fetwa (legal opinion) as to the legality of constitutional government, and that it was believed that he would be made use of to refuse a fetwa in its favour and so give the Khedive an excuse for withdrawing from his full promise. The Hanefite rite has always been the Court rite in Egypt, the Turkish Viceroys, even since the time of Sultan Selim, having usurped the privilege of Court appointment, and the Government has always named a Hanefite to the supreme religious office. At the same time by far the larger number of the students, who amount in all to some 15,000, have been and are of the other two rites, and an attempt was now to be made in accordance with the revolutionary ideas of the day to revert to the more ancient form of nomination, namely by general election. He had come, el Hajrasi said, to consult me about this because the idea was prevalent that Malet was behind the Khedive in the support he was giving to el Abbasi and in the plan of evading his constitutional promise. The difficulty he thought I might be able to remove, if I went to Malet and used my influence with him in their favour. To this I very readily assented, and with the result that I found Malet entirely ignorant of the whole matter and quite ready to say that the religious disputes of the Ulema were outside his province; and that he should interfere on neither side. On the 5th of December, therefore, el Abbasi was by vote of the students deposed from his office and a Sheykh of the Shafeite rite, el Embabeh, named in his place. El Embabeh had not been the most popular candidate, for the majority of the students had been for the Malekite el Aleysh, a man of high courage and religious authority, who afterwards played a leading part during the war and died in the first months of the English occupation in prison, it is generally believed poisoned from his outspoken evidence at the time of Arabi's trial. Embabeh, a man altogether his inferior, obtained the vote only as the result of a compromise, the Khedive having refused el Aleysh. Four thousand students voted at this election and there were only twenty-five dissentients. The little service thus rendered them gave my friends among the Nationalists confidence in my will and power to serve them, and they asked me to delay my departure and stay on at least some weeks to see them through their farther difficulties. To this I readily agreed, seeing in the development of a movement so congenial to my ideas work of the very kind that I was seeking and one in which I could be of real use, as interpreter of their perfectly legitimate ambitions, both with Malet at the Agency and at home with Gladstone.

In the following few weeks I saw Malet almost daily, and acquired considerable influence over him. Though not unsympathetic towards the Nationalists, I found him very ill informed as to their views and objects. He knew none of their leaders personally except Sherif Pasha, and depended in regard to the general drift of affairs on what Sherif and the Khedive thought fit to tell him. For what was passing in the street he had nobody on whom he could rely except his Greek dragoman Aranghi who picked up his news at the cafés of the European quarter. Thus he had little means of understanding the situation, nor was Sinkiewicz, his new French colleague, much better informed. Malet was also in terrible perplexity as to the real wishes of his own Government. Lord Granville had just written him the well-known despatch of November 4th, in which he had stated in vague terms the sympathy of Her Majesty's Government for reforms in Egypt. But this might mean almost anything, and was no guide as to the attitude he should observe if any new conflict should arise between the Khedive and the Nationalists, or between these united and the Financial Controllers. Above all he was in doubt as to Mr. Gladstone's mind in the affair of the Constitution. It was, therefore, a real relief to him to find in me some one who had a definite policy to suggest, and mine was very clearly that he should support the Nationalists.

I was able, too, to assure him about Gladstone that he need not doubt that when the Prime Minister came to know the facts he must be on the Constitutional side. I received support, too, with Malet on this point from certain English friends of mine whom I found at Cairo, winter visitors, whom I was able to influence to my views. Among these the most prominent were two ex-Members of the House of Commons, Lord Houghton, who in early life had been an enthusiastic advocate of freedom in the East, and Sir William Gregory, an old follower of Gladstone's and a well-known Liberal. By the middle of December I had succeeded in bringing round nearly all the English element at Cairo to my view of the case. Even Sir Auckland Colvin, the English Financial Controller, who had three months before given the Khedive the heroic advice to shoot Arabi, professed himself converted and half inclined to come to terms with the revolution.

[CHAPTER VIII]
GAMBETTA'S POLICY. THE JOINT NOTE

On the 6th of December Arabi, who up to this time had been in retirement at Ras-el-Wady, a military post close to Tel-el-Kebir, arrived at Cairo and on the 12th for the first time I saw him. He had hired a house close to his friend Ali Fehmi's, who was now wholly with him, and not far from the Abdin Barracks. It was in company, if I remember rightly, with Eïd Diab, and taking Sabunji with me, that I went to him, it having been arranged beforehand that I should do so by some of our mutual friends. Arabi was at that time at the height of his popularity, being talked of through the length and breadth of Egypt as "El Wahíd," the "only one," and people were flocking from all sides to Cairo to lay their grievances before him. His outer room was full of suppliants, as was indeed the entrance from the street, and this was every day the case. He had already heard of me as a sympathizer and friend of the fellah cause, and received me with all possible cordiality, especially, he told me, on account of what he had also heard, my family connection with Byron, whom, though he knew nothing of his poetry, he held in high esteem for his work for liberty in Greece. The point is worth noting, as it is very characteristic of Arabi's attitude towards humanity at large without distinction of race or creed. There was nothing in him of the fanatic, if fanaticism means religious hatred, and he was always ready to join hands in the cause of liberty with Jew, Christian, or infidel, notwithstanding his own, by no means lukewarm, piety.

I talked to him long and without reserve on all the questions of the day, and found him equally frank and plain spoken. Towards the Khedive he expressed his perfect loyalty "so long as he kept to his promises and made no attempt to baulk the Egyptians of their promised freedom." But it was clear that he did not wholly trust him, and considered it his duty to keep a strict eye over him lest he should swerve from the path. In a letter that I wrote soon after, 20th December, to Mr. Gladstone, when I had had several other conversations with him, I said of him: "The ideas he expresses are not merely a repetition of the phrases of modern Europe, but are based on a knowledge of history and on the liberal tradition of Arabian thought, inherited from the days when Mohammedanism was liberal. He understands that broader Islam which existed before Mohammed, and the bond of a common worship of the one true God which unites his own faith with that of Judaism and Christianity. He disclaims, I believe, all personal ambition, and there is no kind of doubt that the army and country are devoted to him.... Of his own position he speaks with modesty. 'I am,' he says, 'the representative of the army because circumstances have made the army trust me; but the army itself is but the representative of the people, its guardian till such time as the people shall no longer need it. At present we are the sole national force standing between Egypt and its Turkish rulers, who would renew at any moment, were they permitted, the iniquities of Ismaïl Pasha. The European Control only partially provides against this, and makes no provision whatever by national education in self-government for the day when it shall abandon its financial trust. This we have to see to. We have won for the people their right to speak in an Assembly of Notables, and we keep the ground to prevent their being cajoled or frightened out of it. In this we work not for ourselves but for our children and for those that trust us.... We soldiers are for the moment in the position of those Arabs who answered the Caliph Omar when, in old age, he asked the people whether they were satisfied with his rule, and whether he had walked straightly in the path of justice. "O son of El Khattab," said they, "thou hast indeed walked straightly and we love thee. But thou knewest that we were at hand and ready, if thou hadst walked crookedly, to straighten thee with our swords." I trust that no such violence will be needed. As Egyptians we do not love blood, and hope to shed none; and when our Parliament has learned to speak, our duty will be over. But until such time we are resolved to maintain the rights of the people at any cost and we do not fear, with God's help, to justify our guardianship if need be against all who would silence them.'"

This kind of language, so different from that usually used by Eastern politicians in their conversations with Europeans, impressed me very deeply, and I made a strong mental contrast between Arabi and that other champion of liberty whom I had met and talked with at Damascus, Midhat Pasha, altogether in Arabi's favour. Here was no nonsense about railroads and canals and tramways as nostrums that could redeem the East, but words that went to the root of things and fixed the responsibility of good government on the shoulders which alone could bear it. I felt that even in the incredulous and trifling atmosphere of the House of Commons words like these would be listened to—if only they could be heard there!

With regard to the Sultan and the connection of Egypt with Turkey, Arabi was equally explicit. He had no love, he told me, for the Turks who had mis-governed Egypt for centuries, and he would not hear of interference from Constantinople in the internal affairs of the country. But he made a distinction between the Ottoman Government and the religious authority of the Sultan, whom, as Emir el Mumenin, he was bound, as long as he ruled justly, to obey and honour. Also the example of Tunis, which the French had first detached from the Empire, and then taken possession of, showed how necessary it was to preserve the connection of Egypt with the Head of the Moslem world. "We are all," he said, "children of the Sultan, and live together like a family in one house. But, just as in families, we have, each of us provinces of the Empire, our separate room which is our own to arrange as we will and where even the Sovereign must not wantonly intrude. Egypt has gained this independent position through the Firmans granted, and we will take care that she preserves it. To ask for more than this would be to run a foolish risk, and perhaps lose our liberty altogether."[7] I asked him rather bluntly whether he had been, as was then currently asserted, in personal communication with Constantinople, and I noticed that he was reserved in answering and did so evasively. Doubtless the recollection of his conversation with Ahmed Ratib, of which I then knew nothing, crossed his mind and caused his hesitation, but he did not allude to it.

Finally we talked of the relations of Egypt with the Dual Government of France and England. As to this he admitted the good that had been done by freeing the country of Ismaïl and regularizing the finances, but they must not, he said, stand in the way of the National regeneration by supporting the Khedive's absolute rule or the old Circassian Pashas against them. He looked to England rather than to France for sympathy in their struggle for freedom, and especially to Mr. Gladstone, who had shown himself the friend of liberty everywhere—this in response to what I had explained to him of Gladstone's views—but like everybody else just then at Cairo he distrusted Malet. I did what I could to ease his mind on this point, and so we parted. This first interview gave me so favourable an opinion of the fellah Colonel that I went immediately to my friend, Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, to tell him how he had impressed me, and suggested that a program, in the sense of what Arabi had told me, ought to be drawn up which I might send to Mr. Gladstone, as I felt certain that if he knew the truth as to the National aspirations, in an authoritative way, he could not fail to be impressed by it in a sense favourable to them. I spoke, too, to Malet on the same subject, and he agreed that it might do good, and I consequently, in conjunction with Sheykh Mohammed Abdu and others of the civilian leaders, drew up, Sabunji being our scribe, a manifesto embodying succinctly the views of the National party. This Mohammed Abdu took to Mahmud Pasha Sami, who was once again Minister of War, and gained his adhesion to it, and it was also shown to and approved by Arabi. This done I forwarded it, with Malet's knowledge and approval, to Gladstone, explaining to him the whole situation and inviting his sympathy for a movement so very much in accordance with his avowed principles. "I cannot understand," I said, in concluding my letter to Gladstone, "that these are sentiments to be deplored or actions to be crushed by an English Liberal Government. Both may be easily guided. And I think the lovers of Western progress should rather congratulate themselves on this strange and unlooked for sign of political life in a land which has hitherto been reproached by them as the least thinking portion of the stagnant East. You, sir, I think, once expressed to me your belief that the nations of the East could only regenerate themselves by a spontaneous resumption of their lost national Will, and behold in Egypt that Will has arisen and is now struggling to find words which may persuade Europe of its existence."

While sending this "Program of the National Party" to Gladstone, I also at the same time, by Sir William Gregory's advice, sent it to the "Times." Of this course Malet disapproved as he thought it might complicate matters at Constantinople, an idea strongly fixed in his cautious diplomatic mind. But Gregory insisted that it ought to be published, as otherwise it might be pigeon-holed at Downing Street and overlooked; and I think he was right. Gregory was a personal friend of the then excellent editor of the "Times," Chenery, whose services to the National cause in Egypt at this date were very great. Chenery was a man of a large mind on Eastern affairs, being a considerable Arabic scholar, and had published a most admirable English translation of the "Assemblies of Hariri"; and he was able thus to take a wider view of the Egyptian question than the common journalistic one that it was a question primarily concerning the London Stock Exchange—this although he was himself an Egyptian Bondholder. He consequently gave every prominence to the letters Gregory and I wrote to him during the next few months in support of the National movement, and to the last, even when the war came, continued that favour. In the present instance, indeed, Chenery somewhat overdid his welcome to our program, stating that it had been received from Arabi himself, an inaccuracy which enabled Malet, who knew the facts, to disown it through Reuter's Agency as an authentic document.

It will perhaps be as well to explain here the way in which the London Press and especially Reuter's News Agency was at this time manipulated officially at Cairo and made subservient to the intrigues of diplomacy. Very few London newspapers had any regular correspondent in Egypt, the "Times" and the "Pall Mall Gazette" being, as far as I know, the only two that were thus provided. Both, as far as politics were concerned, were practically in the hands of Sir Auckland Colvin, the English Financial Controller, an astute Indian official, with the traditions of Indian diplomacy strongly developed in his political practice. He had some experience of journalism, having been connected with the "Pioneer" in India, an Anglo-Indian journal of pronounced imperialistic type with which he was still in correspondence. He was also Morley's regular correspondent in the "Pall Mall Gazette," and had through him the ear of the Government. The importance of this unavowed connection will be seen later when he made it his business to bring about English intervention. Lastly, on all important diplomatic matters he inspired the "Times," whose regular correspondent, Scott, depended on him for his information. With regard to Reuter and Havas, the Telegraphic Agencies, both were heavily subventioned by the Anglo-French Financial Control, receiving £1,000 a year each, charged on the thin resources of the Egyptian Budget. Reuter especially was the servant and mouthpiece of the English Agency, and the telegrams despatched to London were under Malet's censorship. This sort of manipulation of the organs of public news in the interests of our diplomacy exists in nearly all the capitals where our agents reside, and is a potent instrument for misleading the home public. The influence is not as a rule exercised by any direct payment, but by favour given in regard to secret and valuable information, and also largely by social amenities. In Egypt it has always within my knowledge been supreme, except at moments of extreme crisis when the body of special Press correspondents at Cairo or Alexandria has been too numerous to be kept under official control. In ordinary times our officials have had complete authority both as to what news should be sent to London, and what news, received from London, should be published in Egypt. It is very necessary that this, the true condition of things, should be steadily borne in mind by historians when they consult the newspaper files of these years in search of information.

Down, however, to near the end of the year 1881, except for this small difference of opinion, my relations with Malet remained perfectly and intimately friendly. He made me the confidant of his doubts and troubles, his anxiety to follow out the exact wishes of the Foreign Office, and his fears lest in so difficult a situation he should do anything which should not gain an official approval. He professed himself, and I think he was, in full sympathy with my view of the National case, and he leaned on me as on one able, at any rate, to act as buffer between him and any new violent trouble while waiting a decision in Downing Street as to clear policy. Thus I find a note that on the 19th December I was asked by him and Sir Auckland Colvin, whose acquaintance I had now made and who affected views hardly less favourable than Malet's to the Nationalists, to help them in a difficulty they were in about the Army Estimates.

It was the time of year when the new Budget was being drafted, and the Nationalist Minister of War, Mahmud Sami, had demanded £600,000 as the amount of the year's estimates for his department. It was an increase of I forget how many thousand pounds over the estimate of 1881, and was necessitated, Mahmud Sami said, by the Khedive's promise of raising the army to the full number of men allowed by the Firman, 18,000. The Minister had explained his insistence on the plea that a refusal would or might cause a new military demonstration, the bug-bear of those days; and I was asked to find out what sum the army would really be satisfied with for their estimates. Colvin authorized me to go as far as £522,000, and to tell Arabi and the officers that it was financially impossible to give more. He had no objection, he said, to the army's being increased so long as the estimates were not exceeded. He thought, however, the sum proposed would suffice for an increase up to 15,000 men. I consequently went to Arabi and argued the matter with him and others of the officers; and persuaded them, on my assurance that Colvin's word could be trusted, to withdraw all further objection. They said they would accept the increased sum of £522,000 as sufficient, and make it go as far in the increase of soldiers as it could. They meant to economize, they said, in other ways, and hoped to get their full complement of men out of the balance. They promised me, too, on this occasion to have patience and make no further armed demonstrations, a promise which to the end they faithfully fulfilled. Arabi's last words to me on this occasion were "men sabber dhaffer," "he who has patience conquers." I sent a note the same day to Colvin informing him of the result, and I was also thanked by Malet for having helped them both out of a considerable difficulty.

Nevertheless Malet, about a week later, surprised me one afternoon, 28th December, when I had been playing lawn tennis with him, as I often did at the Agency, by showing me the draft of a despatch he had just sent to the Foreign Office mentioning my visit to Egypt and the encouragement I had given to the Nationalists, and without mentioning what I had done to help him, complaining only of my having sent the Program against his wishes to the "Times." As we had up to that moment been acting in perfect cordiality together, and nothing whatever had occurred beyond the publication of the manifesto, I took him pretty roundly to task for his ill faith in concealing my other services rendered to his diplomacy, and insisted that he should cancel this misleading despatch, and with such energy that he wrote in my presence a cancelling telegram, and also a second despatch repairing in some measure the injustice he had done me. I have never quite understood what Malet's motive was in this curious manœuvre. I took it at the time to be a passing fit of jealousy, a dislike to the idea that it should be known at the Foreign Office that he owed anything to me in the comparatively good relations he had succeeded in establishing with the Nationalists; but on reflection I have come to the conclusion, as one more in accordance with his cautious character, that he was merely guarding himself officially against public responsibility of any kind being fixed on him for my Nationalist views, should these be condemned in Downing Street. It is the more likely explanation because his private conscience evidently pricked him about it to the extent of avowing to me what he had officially done. The insincerity, however, though repented of, was a warning to me which I did not forget, and while I continued for some weeks more to go to the Agency it was always with a feeling of possible betrayal at Malet's hands. I was ready, nevertheless, to help him, and it was not long before he was again obliged, by the extreme circumstances of his political isolation at Cairo, to resort to my good offices, and, finding himself in flood water altogether beyond his depth, to send me once more as his messenger of peace to Arabi and the other Nationalist leaders.

All had gone well so far, as far as any of us knew, in the political situation at Cairo down to the end of the year, and during the first week of the new year, 1882. There was a good understanding now between all parties in Egypt, the army was quiescent, the Press was moderate under Mohammed Abdu's popular censorship, and the Nationalist Ministers, undisturbed by menace from any quarter, were preparing the draft of the Organic Law which was to give the country its civil liberties. On the 26th of December, the Chamber of Delegates summoned to discuss the articles of the promised Constitution had met at Cairo, and had been opened formally with a reassuring speech by the Khedive in person, whose attitude was so changed for the better towards the popular movement that Malet was able, on the 2nd of January, to write home to Lord Granville: "I found His Highness, for the first time since my return in September, cheerful in mood and taking a hopeful view of the situation. The change was very noticeable. His Highness appears to have frankly accepted the situation." Arabi had ceased to busy himself personally with the redress of grievances, and it had been arranged with the approval of the French and English agents that Arabi should, as they expressed it, "regularize" his position and accept the responsibility of his acknowledged political influence by taking office as Under-Secretary at the War Office. This it had been thought would be putting the dangerous free lance in uniform and securing him to the cause of order.

The only doubtful point was now the attitude of the Deputies in regard to the details of the Constitution they had been assembled to discuss; and the majority of them, as were my reforming friends at the Azhar, seemed disposed to moderation. "We have waited," said Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, "so many hundred years for our freedom that we can well afford now to wait some months." Certainly at that date Malet and Colvin, and I think also Sinkiewicz, were favourably disposed to the claim of the Nationalists to have a true Parliament. They had begun to see that it was the universal national desire, and would act as a safety-valve for ideas more dangerous. A frank public declaration of goodwill at that moment on the part of the English and French Governments towards the popular hopes would have secured a workable arrangement between the Nationalist Government and the Dual Control, which would have safeguarded the bondholders' interests no less than it would have secured to Egypt its liberty. Nor did we think that this would be long delayed.

On the first day of the New Year the National Program I had sent to Mr. Gladstone was published in the "Times," with a leading article and approving comments, and in spite of Malet's prognostication of evil had been well received in Europe, and even at Constantinople where it had drawn down no kind of thunderbolt. Its tone was so studiously moderate, and its reasoning so frank and logical that it seemed impossible the position in Egypt should any longer be misunderstood. Especially in England, with an immense Liberal majority in the House of Commons, and Mr. Gladstone at the head of affairs, it was almost inconceivable that it should not be met in a friendly spirit—quite inconceivable to us who were waiting anxiously for Gladstone's answer at Cairo, that at that very moment the English Foreign Office should be proceeding to acts of menace and the language of armed intervention. Unfortunately, however, though none of us, not even Malet, at the time knew it, the decision, adverse to the Egyptian hopes, had already been half taken. The program reached Mr. Gladstone, as nearly as I can calculate it, a fortnight too late. We were all expecting a message of peace, when, like thunder in a clear sky, the ill-omened Joint Note of January 6th, 1882, was launched upon us. It upset all our hopes and calculations and threw back Egypt once more into a sea of troubles.

It is right that the genesis of this most mischievous document, to which is directly due the whole of the misfortunes during the year, with the loss to Egypt of her liberty, to Mr. Gladstone of his honour, and to France of her secular position of influence on the Nile, should be truly told. Something regarding it may be learned from the published documents, both French and English, but only indirectly, and not all; and I am perhaps the only person not officially concerned in its drafting who am in a position to put all the dots with any precision on the i's. In Egypt it has not unnaturally been supposed that, because in the event it turned to the advantage of English aggression, it was therefore an instrument forged for its own purposes at our Foreign Office, but in reality the reverse is true and the note was drafted not in Downing Street but at the Quai d'Orsay, and in the interests, so far as these were political—for they were also financial—of French ambition.

I have told already how I travelled with Sir Charles Dilke from London to Paris, and of our conversation on the way and of the impression left on me by it that he would "sell Egypt for his Commercial Treaty"; and this is precisely what in fact had happened. The dates as far as I can fix them were these: On the 15th of November St. Hilaire had gone out of office, and had been succeeded by Gambetta, who found himself faced with a general Mohammedan revolt against the French Government in Tunis and Algeria. He was alarmed at the Pan-Islamic character it was taking, and attributed it largely to the Sultan Abdul Hamid's propaganda, and he thought he saw the same influence at work in the National movement in Egypt, as well as the intrigues of Ismaïl, Halim, and others. France had been traditionally hostile to the sovereign claims of the Porte in North Africa, and Gambetta came into office determined to thwart and deal with them by vigorous measures. He was besides, through his Jewish origin, closely connected with the haute finance of the Paris Bourse, and was intimate with the Rothschilds and other capitalists, who had their millions invested in Egyptian Bonds. Nubar Pasha and Rivers Wilson were then both living at Paris, and his close friends and advisers in regard to Egyptian matters, and it was from them that he took his view of the situation.

He had, therefore, not been more than a few days in office before he entered into communication with our Foreign Office, with the object of getting England to join him in vigorous action against the National movement, as a crusade of civilization and a support to the established order at Cairo of Financial things. In London at the same time there was a strong desire to get the Commercial Treaty, which was about to expire, renewed with France as speedily as possible, and advantage was taken at the Foreign Office of Sir Charles Dilke's personal intimacy with the new French Premier to get the negotiation for it finished. A commission for this purpose, of which Dilke and Wilson were the two English members, had been sitting at Paris since the month of May, and so far without result. Dilke's visit to Paris was in connection with both matters, and was resolved on within a week of Gambetta's accession to power. Reference to newspapers of that date, November 1881, will show that the negotiations between the two Governments about the Commercial Treaty were just then in a highly critical state, and it was even reported that they had been broken off. Dilke's presence, however, gave them new life, or at least prevented their demise. Between the 22nd of November and the 15th of December he passed to and fro between the two capitals; and at the latter date we find Gambetta (Blue Book Egypt 5, 1882, page 21) approaching Lord Lyons, our Ambassador at Paris, with a proposal to take common action in Egypt. He considers it to be "extremely important to strengthen the authority of Tewfik Pasha; every endeavour should be made to inspire him with confidence in the support of France and England, and to infuse into him firmness and energy. The adherents of Ismaïl and Halim and the Egyptians generally should be made to understand that France and England would not acquiesce in his being deposed.... It would be advisable to cut short the intrigues of Constantinople," etc. This language is communicated by Lord Lyons to the Foreign Office, and on the 19th Lord Granville "agrees in thinking that the time has come when the two Governments should consider what course had better be adopted," etc. Thus encouraged, Gambetta on the 24th proposes to take occasion of the meeting of the Egyptian Notables to make "a distinct manifestation of union between France and England so as to strengthen the position of Tewfik Pasha and discourage the promoters of disorder." The Egyptian Chamber meets on the 26th, and on the 28th Dilke, who has returned the day before to Paris, has a long conversation with Gambetta about the Treaty of Commerce ("Times"), while on precisely the same day Lord Granville agrees to give "assurance to Tewfik Pasha of the sympathy and support of France and England, and to encourage His Highness to maintain and assert his proper authority."

This identity of date alone suffices to fix the connection between the two negotiations, and shows the precise moment at which the fatal agreement was come to, and that my communication of the National Program to Gladstone, which was posted on the 20th, must have been just too late to prevent the disaster. Letters then took a week to reach London, and Gladstone was away for the Christmas holidays, and cannot have had time, however much he may have been inclined to do so, to forward it on to the Foreign Office. Our Government thus committed to Gambetta's policy, Gambetta on the 31st (Blue Book Egypt 5, 1882) presents to Lyons the draft, drawn up with his own hand, of the Joint Note to be despatched to Cairo in the sense of his previous communication of the 24th—and, be it noted, on the same day negotiations for a renewal of the Commercial Treaty are announced as formally renewed. On the 1st of January the Paris correspondent of the "Times" sends a précis of the Joint Note to London, explaining that he only now forwards it, having been instructed by M. Gambetta only to divulge it "at the proper moment." This is understood to mean the final success of Dilke's commercial mission, and the following day, 2nd January, he returns to London. I trace, nevertheless, the influence of my appeal to Gladstone in the delay of five days, still made by Granville before he unwillingly signs the Note, and the reservation he stipulates for on the part of Her Majesty's Government that "Her Majesty's Government must not be considered as committing themselves thereby to any particular mode of action," a postscript typical of Granville's character, and, as I think too, of a conflict in ideas, afterwards very noticeable, between the Foreign Office, pushed on by Dilke, and Gladstone as Prime Minister.

Such is the evidence which, intelligently read, can be gathered from the published documents of the day. I have, however, a letter from Sir Rivers Wilson dated a few days later, 13th January, in answer to one of mine, which explains in a few words the whole situation. "I am above all pleased," he writes, "at the interest you are taking in Egyptian politics. You confirm what I believe to be the case in two particulars at least, viz., that the soldiers express the feeling of the population, and that Tewfik has been working with the Sultan. As regards the latter circumstance I must say there is nothing surprising in it. Six weeks ago Gambetta said to me, 'Le Khedive est aux genoux du Sultan.' But the reason is plain. Tewfik is weak and cowardly. His army is against him. The Harems hate him. He found no support there where he naturally might have looked for it, viz., at the hands of the English and French Governments, and so he turned to the only quarter where sympathy and perhaps material assistance were forthcoming. It was to remedy this state of things that the idea of the Joint Declaration was conceived, whatever gloss or subsequent explanation may be now put forward, and I shall be disappointed if it does not produce the desired effect and cause the officers, Ulemas, and Notables to understand that renewed disturbance means armed intervention in Europe. Our Government may not like it, but they are bound now by formal engagement to France and cannot withdraw."

This letter, coming from Wilson at Paris, holding the official position there he did, and being, as he was, on intimate terms both with Dilke and Gambetta, is a document of the highest historical importance, and fixes beyond the possibility of doubt on the French Government the initiative in the designed intervention, though the Yellow Books also are not altogether silent. These, though most defective in their information, do not hide Gambetta's initial responsibility. I heard at the time, and I believe that the form of joint intervention he designed for Egypt was that England should demonstrate with a fleet at Alexandria while France should land troops. Had that come to pass we cannot doubt that French influence would now be supreme in Egypt. It was only frustrated that winter by the accident of Gambetta's unlooked-for fall from power by an adverse vote on some domestic matter in the Chamber at the end of the month, for Gladstone at that time was far too averse from violent measures to have sent an English fleet with a French army, and the landing of troops would have been certainly needed.

There is more than one moral to be drawn from this historic episode, and the most instructive is, perhaps, the fact that neither of the two Ministers, with all their cleverness and in spite of their apparent success each in his own scheme, really effected his purpose. Gambetta and Granville in the first weeks of January doubtless plumed themselves on having gained an important object and strengthened the friendly link between their two Governments by a common agreement. Gambetta had got his note, Granville his treaty. But neither rogue was really able to bring home his booty. Gambetta, though he exerted all his influence with the Chamber to get the Commercial Treaty with England renewed, failed to obtain a majority and the treaty lapsed, and with it the Liberal argument that Free Trade was not isolating England. On the other hand, though he had got Granville unwillingly to sign the Note, which he intended to use for the glory of France, Gambetta found that he had forged a weapon which he could not himself wield and which within six months passed into his rival's hand, while the friendly arrangement proved almost as soon as it was come to, to be the destruction of all cordial feeling between the two nations for close on a generation. Personally, in the disappointment of the two intriguers and the rival interest of the two nations, I am able to hold a detached attitude. What seems to me tragic in the matter is that for the sake of their paltry ambitions and paltrier greeds a great national hope was wrecked, and the cause of reform for a great religion postponed for many years. The opportunity of good thrown away by the two statesmen between them can hardly recur again in another half century.

The effect of Gambetta's menace to the National Party was disastrous at Cairo to the cause of peace. I was with Malet soon after the note arrived, and he gave it me to read and asked me what I thought of it. I said: "They will take it as a declaration of war." He answered: "It is not meant in a hostile sense," and explained to me how it might be interpreted in a way favourable to the National hopes. He asked me to go to the Kasr el Nil and persuade Arabi, who had just been made Under-Secretary of War, to accept it thus, authorizing me to say, "that the meaning of the Note as understood by the British Government was that the English Government would not permit any interference of the Sultan with Egypt, and would also not allow the Khedive to go back from his promises or molest the Parliament." He also told me, though he did not authorize me to repeat this on his authority, that he hoped to get leave to add to the Note a written explanation in the sense just given. I know that he telegraphed repeatedly for some such permission, and that he wrote strongly condemning the note as impolitic and dangerous. Not a word, however, of these important protests and requests is to be found in the Blue Books, though the Blue Books show that Lord Granville must have paid attention to them to the extent of expressing himself willing to give some such explanation of the Note but being prevented from doing so by Gambetta. Sinkiewicz seems also to have asked his Government to be allowed to explain the Note, but was forbidden. Sir Auckland Colvin, too, condemned the Note in conversation with me quite as strongly as Malet had done.

I went accordingly to the Kasr el Nil about noon on the 9th (the text of the Note had reached us on the 8th) and found Arabi alone in his official room. For the first and only time I have seen him so, he was angry. His face was like a thundercloud, and there was a peculiar gleam in his eye. He had seen the text of the Note though it had not been published—indeed, it had only as yet been telegraphed—and I asked him how he understood it. "Tell me, rather," he said, "how you understand it." I then delivered my message. He said: "Sir Edward Malet must really think us children who do not know the meaning of words." "In the first place," he said, "it is the language of menace. There is no clerk in this office who would use such words with such a meaning." He alluded to the reference to the Notables made in the first paragraph of the Note. "That," he said, "is a menace to our liberties." Next, the declaration that French and English policy were one meant that, as France had invaded Tunis, so England would invade Egypt. "Let them come," he said, "every man and child in Egypt will fight them. It is contrary to our principles to strike the first blow, but we shall know how to return it." Lastly, as to the guarantee of Tewfik Pasha's throne. "The throne," he said, "if there is one, is the Sultan's. The Khedive needs no foreign guarantees. You may tell me what you will, but I know the meaning of words better than Mr. Malet does." In truth, Malet's explanation was nonsense, and I felt a fool before Arabi and ashamed of having made myself the bearer of such rubbish. But I assured him I had delivered the message as Sir Edward had given it me. "He asks you to believe it," I said, "and I ask you to believe him." At leaving he softened, took me by the arm to lead me down and invited me still to come as before to his house. I said: "I shall only come back when I have better news for you," by which I intended to hint at a possible explanation of the Note such as Malet had telegraphed for permission to give. None however came. Nor did I see Arabi again till more than three weeks later, when a letter from Mr. Gladstone reached me which I interpreted in a more hopeful sense and which caused us great rejoicing.

On returning to the Residency, Malet asked me how I had fared. "They are irreconcilable now," I answered. "The Note has thrown them into the arms of the Sultan." Such indeed was the effect, and not with the soldiers alone, but as soon as the Note was published with all sections of the National Party, even with the Khedive. Gambetta, if he had expected to strengthen Tewfik's hands, had missed his mark entirely. The timid Khedive was only frightened, and the Nationalists, instead of being frightened, were enraged. The Egyptians for the first time found themselves quite united. Sheykh Mohammed Abdu and the cautious Azhar reformers from that point threw in their lot wholly with the advanced party. All, even the Circassians, resented the threat of foreign intervention, and on the other hand the most anti-Turkish of the Nationalists, such as my friend Hajrasi, saw that Arabi had been right in secretly leaning upon the Sultan. Arabi thus gained immensely in popularity and respect, and for many days after this I hardly heard anything from my Egyptian friends but the language of Pan-Islamism. It was a Roustan[8] policy over again, they said.

I did my best to smooth down matters with them till the explanation should arrive which Malet had promised us; but I found my efforts useless. It was an alarming three weeks for us all, from the delivery of the Note till Gambetta's fall. News came that a French force was being assembled for embarkation at Toulon, and that was the form of intervention generally expected. Indeed, I think it is not too much to say that Gambetta's resignation on 31st January alone saved Egypt from the misfortune, even greater perhaps than what afterwards befell her, of a French invasion avowedly anti-Mohammedan and in purely European interests.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Sir William Gregory, who saw Arabi about the same date as I did, has recorded in the "Times" very similar language as used by him.

[8] Roustan was the French diplomatist at Tunis who had engineered the French designs on the Regency.

[CHAPTER IX]
FALL OF SHERIF PASHA

The political crisis at Cairo, by the middle of January, was evidently approaching fast. Indeed it had become inevitable. The publication of the Joint Note happened to coincide with the drafting of the new Leyha or Organic Law, which was to define the power of the Representative Chamber in the promised Parliament. In regard to this, the Financial Controllers had been insisting with the Ministry that the power they had been exercising for the last two years of drawing up the yearly Budget, according to their own view of the economic requirements of the country, should remain intact, that is to say, that it should not be subject to discussion or a vote in the Chamber; and to this Sherif Pasha had agreed, and had already drafted his project of law without assigning to the Chamber any right in money matters. The majority of the delegates, however, were not unnaturally dissatisfied at this, arguing that the Foreign Financial Control, having its sole status in the country as guardian of the foreign obligations, and as the interest on the debt amounted only to one-half of the revenue, the remaining half ought to be at the disposal of the nation.

Nevertheless, there is no reason to suppose that the point would not have been conceded by them, especially as Sultan Pasha, who had been named their President, was with Sherif in considering it prudent to yield, had things remained during the month as they were at the beginning. It has been seen how readily the War Office had come to terms with the Controllers in the matter of the Army Estimates. Now, however, under the menace of the Note, the Notables were no longer in a mood of conciliation, and met Sherif's draft with a counterdraft of their own, adding a number of new articles to the Leyha, largely extending the Parliamentary powers, and subjecting the half of the Budget not affected to the interest of the debt to vote by the Chamber. This brought the Controllers into active conflict with them, M. de Blignières taking the lead in it and bringing Colvin into line with him. The Controllers declared it absolutely necessary that the Budget should remain whole and undivided in their hands, and denounced the counter-draft as being a project, not of a Parliament, but of a "Convention." The phrase, founded on memories of the French Revolution, was doubtless de Blignières', but it was adopted by Colvin, and pressed by him on Malet. The dispute was a serious one, and might lead to just such mischief as Malet feared, and give excuse to the French Government for the intervention it was seeking. Sherif having already committed himself to the Controllers' view, was being persuaded by them to stand firm, and the Khedive's attitude was doubtful. A quarrel between the Khedive and his Parliament on a financial question involving European bondholding interests was just such a case as the French Government—for Gambetta was still in office—might be expected to take advantage of for harm.

In this emergency Malet—and Colvin, who though he wished to get his way as Financial Controller had no mind for French intervention—joined in asking me yet once again to help them, and to make a last effort to induce the extreme party among the Notables to yield something of their pretensions, and after consultation with Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, who as usual was for prudence and conciliation, it was arranged that I should have a private conference at his house with a deputation from them, and argue the case with them, and show them the probable consequences of their resistance—namely, armed intervention. Accordingly, I got up the case of the Controllers with Colvin, and drew up with Malet the different points of the argument I was to use. These I have by me in a paper headed, "Notes of what I have to say to the Members of the Egyptian Parliament, 17th January, 1882."

According to this my instructions were to represent to the Members of the Deputation that the existing procedure respecting the Budget was an international affair, which neither Sherif nor the Parliament had any right to touch without gaining the consent of the two controlling Governments. I was to recite the history of the Control's establishment, and show them a private Note which had been appended by Malet and Monge (the French Consul-General), 15th November, 1879, to the Decree instituting it. I was to invite the members to consider whether an alteration in the form of determining the Budget was not an international matter, and, as such, outside the sphere of their action. They had admitted that international matters must be left untouched by them. The control of the Budget was an international matter. Therefore it should be left untouched by them. I was, however, authorized by Colvin to say that personally he had no objection to a slight modification of the present arrangement, such as should give the Parliament a consultative voice which might later become a right of voting. Should they accept such a compromise, Malet would represent the matter favourably to his Government, though he had no authority to promise its acceptance by France or England. All other differences with Sherif they must settle with him themselves, etc., etc.

On this basis, with Sabunji's help and Mohammed Abdu's, I argued the case thoroughly with them, and convinced myself that there was no possibility of their yielding. They agreed, indeed, to modify three or four of the articles which the Controllers had principally objected to as giving the Chamber powers of a "Convention," and the amendments I proposed in these were in fact incorporated later in the published Leyha. But on the Article of the Budget they were quite obdurate, notwithstanding the support Sheykh Mohammed Abdu gave me. They would not yield a line of it, and I returned crestfallen to report my failure, nor did I again undertake any mission of mediation between Malet and the Nationalists. I had done my best to help him to a peaceful solution of his difficulties, but our points of view from this time forth became too divergent for me any longer to be able to work with him. Although I had done my very best to persuade the Notables to give way—for I was then firmly convinced that they were menaced with intervention—I could not help in my inner mind agreeing with them in their claim of controlling the free half of the Budget as a sound one, if Parliamentary Government was to be a reality for them, not a sham. Malet's despatches of the time show that they were all of one mind on this point, and even Sultan Pasha, who was a timid man and easily frightened, declared roundly that Sherif's draft was "like a drum; it made a great sound but was hollow inside." As between Sherif and the Notables in the quarrel which followed, my anti-Turkish sympathies put me on their side rather than on his. At Malet's suggestion I had a little before called on Sherif and had discussed the matter with him, and had been unfavourably impressed.

Sherif was a Europeanized Turk of good breeding and excellent manners, but with all that arrogant contempt of the fellahin which distinguished his class in Egypt. Malet had a high opinion of him because he was a good French scholar and so was easy to deal with in the ordinary diplomatic way, but to me he showed himself for this very reason in disagreeable contrast with the sincere and high-minded men who were the real backbone of the National movement, and for whom he expressed nothing but the superior scorn of a fine French gentleman. He was cheerfully convinced of his own fitness to govern them and of their incapacity. "The Egyptians," he told me, "are children and must be treated like children. I have offered them a Constitution which is good enough for them, and if they are not content with it they must do without one. It was I who created the National Party, and they will find that they cannot get on without me. These peasants want guidance." When, therefore, a fortnight later the quarrel became an open one between him and them I had no difficulty in deciding which way my sympathies lay.

I was no longer at Cairo when the news of Sherif's resignation on the 2nd of February reached me. The failure of my negotiation, just described, with the Notables, had depressed my spirits. I felt that by undertaking it I had risked much of my popularity with my European friends, and that they perhaps distrusted me for the pains I had taken to convince them against a course on which their hearts were set; and I had retired to a distance from the conflict which I could no longer control or help in to any good purpose. While living at the Hôtel du Nil during the winter I had all the time had a camp with tents and camels and attendant Arabs, pitched outside the city, to which I had occasionally gone, and now I retired to it altogether. The camp was pitched on the desert land between Koubba Palace and Matarieh, then a wholly desert region at a point now called Zeitoun, where there were the insignificant ruins of what had once been a shaduf, the sole sign of human habitation. Here we were completely alone, except that at the distance of a mile there was another camp, that of Prince Ahmed, outside Materieh. There was no communication then by any form of public conveyance with Cairo, and when at rare intervals we went in, we rode our camels to a point between Abbassiyeh and Faggalah where donkeys were to be hired. There was not a single house on the sands beyond Abbassiyeh to the north-east. For a moment thus I was able to forget politics and to enjoy what I have always loved best, life in the open air. I had, however, rendered a last service to my friends by writing a warm defence of the Egyptian National policy in the "Times." To this I was urged by my friend, Sir William Gregory, who had himself sent more than one powerful letter in the same sense to what was then emphatically the leading journal of Europe.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance a letter on any subject had in those days when published by the "Times," and the certainty there was, if it was on any political question, of its being read by the statesmen concerned and treated with full attention. Nor is it, perhaps, too much to say that Gregory's letters and mine, especially his, were largely the means of obtaining a respite for Egypt from the dangers that threatened her. As they came back to Cairo and were reproduced in Arabic by the native Press, our Egyptian friends were reassured about us and their confidence in me revived. It was at the expense, however, of Malet's goodwill. Like all diplomatists he hated publicity, and he was angry with us both because we, who had both been in the Government service, had appealed as it were over the head of the Foreign Office and his own to the Press. With the regular Press correspondents he knew how to deal, but he could not deal with us who were independent writers, or exercise the smallest censorship on our opinions. There was an end therefore to the close intimacy I had, up to that point, in spite of small disagreements, had with the Agency. This was unfortunate, as it threw Malet, who always needed to lean on some one stronger than himself, into other and less conciliatory hands.

On the 31st of January, the very day of the change of Ministry at Paris, I find a note to the effect that I went in to Cairo and saw Colvin and had a remarkable conversation with him. This has become of great historical importance through subsequent events, for it marks the date within a few days of the change of the temper of the English Financial Control, and with it of our diplomacy towards Egyptian Nationalism, and also fixes upon Colvin, what is indeed his due, the chief responsibility of the rupture which afterwards through his contriving came about. I have already said something of Sir Auckland Colvin's character. He was a typical Anglo-Indian official, strong, self-reliant, hard, with the tradition of methods long practised in India, but which were still new to our European diplomacy, endowed with just enough sympathy with Oriental character to make use of it, without loving it, for English purposes; but cold in manner and unattractive. I had at an earlier stage of affairs taken Sheykh Mohammed Abdu to call on him, thinking to bring about a rapprochement, and I had also tried to do the same with the officers. But his manner had repelled the Sheykh, and the officers had been too shy to come with me. He was sometimes astonishingly frank in speech. I remember his telling me, on one occasion, when we were talking of Eastern duplicity, that it was a mistake to suppose that in this Orientals were our masters. An Englishman who knew the game, he said, could always beat them at their own weapons, and they were mere children in deceit when it came to a contest with us.

In the present instance he was more than usually outspoken. The quarrel between the Notables and Sherif was at its acutest stage; and I asked him what he thought of the situation. He said he considered it most grave. It was evident that the Nationalists were resolved upon the fall of Sherif, and, if they succeeded, he (Colvin) would have no more to do with them. He told me he had completely changed his mind about them. He had thought them amenable to reason, but he found them quite impracticable, and he would do his best to ruin them if ever they came into office. I asked him how he proposed to do this, or stop a movement which he had so lately approved, but which had gone quite beyond his or anybody's control—how, except by that very intervention we had all along been trying to avoid. He said he had changed his mind about intervention too; that he believed it now to be necessary and inevitable, and that he would spare no pains to bring it about. I expostulated with him, urging that intervention meant only war and war meant only annexation. He said he quite understood it in that sense. The same thing had been seen over and over again in India. England would never give up the footing she had got in Egypt, and it was useless to talk about the abstract rights and wrongs of the Egyptians. These would not be considered. He repeated what he had said about ruining the National Party, and added that he had made no secret of his view. He should work for intervention and, if it must be so, for annexation. I am quite sure I am not mis-quoting this conversation in any essential feature. It was not merely half a dozen words spoken in haste, but an argument which lasted half an hour; and it affected me so strongly that I decided to warn my Egyptian friends, to whom I had pledged my word for Colvin's good feeling towards them, that they must now expect the worst of him. They answered that they knew it, as they had received information already in the same sense about him.

This conversation opened my eyes to a new danger. Only the day before I had received two letters, written the one from the Liberal, the other from the Tory camp in England, and both conveying the same warning. John Morley, in answer to a letter I had written asking his sympathy with the National cause, wrote: "Whether your schemes will come to much I am at this moment inclined to doubt. Egypt, unluckily for its people, is the battlefield of European rivalries; and an honest settlement in the interests of its population will be prevented to suit the convenience of France. I don't see my way out of it. It is that curse of the world, la haute politique, which will spoil everything." Lytton also had written: "That small portion of the British public which thinks at all of foreign affairs is much pre-occupied and disturbed in mind by the false position into which we are drifting in Egypt, and almost too frightened to speak loudly on the subject. It seems to me, however, that their ideas are very hazy. In my own mind there is no doubt that this is only the first fruits of a radically wrong policy which has lost us the co-operation of Germany and Austria, and placed us practically at the mercy of France, a power with which we can never have any sound or safe alliance." Both letters had been written before the fall of Gambetta, and here I seemed to hear an echo of their words, especially Morley's words, "la haute politique," from the man who had it most in his power to spoil an honest settlement, and that to suit the convenience, not of France merely, but of England. I was very much alarmed. I have often regretted my last words to Colvin on this occasion. "I defy you," I said, "to bring about English intervention or annexation." I regret it because I think it added a personal as well as a political stimulus to his subsequent action. It had become a trial of strength between us.

Two days later, 2nd February, Sherif Pasha, finding he could not bend the National Delegates to his will, and under the influence, I make little doubt, of Colvin's threat of intervention, resigned office, and was succeeded, at the choice of the Delegates, by Mahmud Pasha Sami as Prime Minister, with Arabi as Minister of War, a thoroughgoing Nationalist combination at which all Egypt rejoiced.[9] I heard the news at my retreat in the desert with mixed feelings of jubilation and anxiety, an anxiety which was only relieved when on the 27th I received an answer from Mr. Gladstone to my letter of six weeks before enclosing to him the National program. The long delay in replying was doubtless due to the embarrassment and perplexity as to a policy which Lord Granville's deal with Gambetta had involved him in. Gambetta's providential fall, however, had now to a large extent freed our Government's hands, and a passage was being inserted in the Queen's speech at the opening of Parliament which conveyed something like an expression of sympathy with the National Egyptian hopes. This, Mr. Gladstone sent me later, and his letter concluded with the following reassuring words: "I feel quite sure," he said, "that unless there be a sad failure of good sense on one or both, or as I should say, on all sides, we shall be able to bring this question to a favourable issue. My own opinions about Egypt were set forth in the 'Nineteenth Century' a short time before we took office, and I am not aware as yet of having seen any reason to change them."[10]

The reference thus made to his article "Aggression on Egypt," was of the very highest importance, for, as already mentioned, the article was a scathing denunciation of just that forward policy of intervention and annexation which Colvin had propounded to me. Armed with this proof of Gladstone's goodwill I went back joyfully to Cairo, and was able to tell Arabi that I had not assured him of my sympathy in vain. I found him at the War Office surrounded by his friends, and in converse with the Coptic Patriarch, and with a tribe of idle sycophants as well, Levantines and Europeans, come to salute the rising sun. Among these the new Minister moved with a certain dignified superiority which became him well. He was no longer the mere colonel of a regiment, but a man sobered by the sense of public responsibility, a fellah still, and still a patriot, but also with the manner of a statesman. He took me aside, and I showed him Gladstone's letter, and we rejoiced over it together as a message of good omen.