Chapter I: The Dufferin Settlement

I TAKE up my narrative of Egyptian events where I left them at the end of 1882.

The restoration of the Khedive Tewfik at Cairo had been accomplished by Lord Wolseley’s army, and Egypt, prostrate and dumb, lay like a woman betrayed waiting the fate to be allotted to her at the hand of her despoiler. Arabi’s trial over, it became a matter of supreme interest for all of us who had interested ourselves in the National movement as one of progress and reform to speculate on what was to be the ultimate fortune or ill-fortune of the Egyptians meted out to them by Mr. Gladstone’s Government—whether they would return to their ancient slavery under the Circassians, or whether, as we hoped, Gladstone would make good his promises of favouring the development of their political institutions, and helping them on their road to self-government—or whether, again, they would meet the fate of so many other nations of the East, and become permanently incorporated in the British Empire.

For this last course all the Imperialists of England, headed by “The Times,” were crying out, and it was generally believed that Bismarck, then Lord Paramount of Europe, would consent to it, while France, though sullen and vexed with herself for having missed an opportunity of acquisition she had long marked out as her own, was not prepared for effectual remonstrance. Her seizure of Tunis the year before, under circumstances of even less legality, closed her mouth for any moral preaching, as did the avowed selfishness of her attitude towards Egypt which had been even more blatantly than ours that of advocate there of financial and foreign commercial interests.

I do not think, however, that it was really within the power of our Liberal Government all at once and so entirely to falsify their pledges. A protocol of disinterestedness had been signed by Lord Dufferin at Constantinople at the meeting of the Conference the previous summer, which in the most public manner possible engaged England to make her intervention one for the general European good, and not merely for British advantage. Lord Granville, too, was bound over and over again by his declarations to the theory that the English army had been sent to Egypt solely to restore order and maintain the _status quo_, while both the Khedive’s authority and the Sultan’s had been invoked to give the intervention a colour of legality, and Sir Beauchamp Seymour in a solemn document, published a fortnight after the bombardment of Alexandria and before landing troops, had engaged the faith of England not to attempt conquest or in any way injure either the religion or the liberties of the Egyptians. To annex or proclaim a protectorate would consequently have been a huge moral lapse Gladstone was not prepared for, though a certain section of the Cabinet, headed by Hartington and Chamberlain, were pushing hard in that direction, while the Foreign Office, refusing to accept the evidence of the new facts revealed at the trial, clung to its false theory of the causes of the war, which it needed as an excuse, and hardened its heart against all repentance for its past mistakes. Moreover—and for this I think I may claim to have helped to avert from Egypt the supreme disaster of annexation—the non-conformist conscience of the old-fashioned Liberals of England was now awake to the iniquity of the war, and was indignant at the betrayal by Gladstone of his Midlothian principles, and was insisting with him that liberty should not be altogether suppressed on the Nile. This was a consideration which could not but affect a politician of Gladstone’s temperament; and there was yet another reason perhaps stronger than all the rest with him, though I as yet only half suspected it, his economic prudence as ex- Chancellor of the Exchequer, which made him shrink from incurring full responsibility for England for the liabilities of a country then believed to be on the point of bankruptcy. Egypt from that point of view might be a burden involving money expenditure for many years as well as international trouble, and this consideration in all probability decided him. It is certain that, in subsequent years, his scruples about retaining Egypt became less and less imperative in almost exact correspondence with the revival of the financial credit.

Be this as it may, the opportunity of English annexation was, fortunately for the Egyptians, let slip in 1882, and did not again recur in Mr. Gladstone’s lifetime; nor, let us hope, will another be found in the still less scrupulous future reserved for the British Empire. Egypt, though wounded almost to death, did not die as a nation with the destruction of her national army at Tel-el-Kebir, and still preserves her historic identity as a legally self-governing State, technically dependent on no European Power. The settlement of her future as such was the outcome of the divergent ideas and motives and pledges and interests just enumerated, and, as all the world knows, was entrusted to Lord Dufferin, already in Egypt, in the opening months of the year 1883. Dufferin’s task, it may be admitted, was a difficult one. It was to effect a compromise which should at the same time satisfy Europe, keep nominal faith with the Khedive, and have at least an appearance of giving back to the Egyptians the political liberties they had for a moment won and were now once more deprived of. At the time of his appointment I had considerable confidence in Dufferin. I had known him personally for more than twenty years, from the time indeed when, as an attaché to the Legation at Athens, I had made his acquaintance on his return from his Nile tour in the winter of 1859-60, and I knew that his sympathy with the fellahin had then been great. He was in those days an interesting and very charming young man of not much more than thirty, and he had spent most of his time at Athens with us at the Legation, joining our rides and excursions, and taking part in our mounted paper- chases which took place twice a week, as well as in such social amusements as the Corps Diplomatique at Athens afforded. His mother, herself the most charming of women, was travelling with him, and both had been especially kind to me in a way I did not forget, and I am glad to think that during the whole of Lord Dufferin’s long life the pleasant relations thus begun between us were maintained as often as we met.

In the year following he had received his first public appointment, that of Commissioner to Syria at the time of the Maronite massacres, and he had returned to Athens after them, and I remembered the details of the settlement he had so successfully arranged for the Lebanon. By this he had pledged himself to the principle of provincial autonomy under Ottoman sovereignty, while a little later the weight of his opinion had been given to our Government when it insisted with the French that they should withdraw their army of occupation from Syria. It is curious how closely parallel were, in fact, the two cases of intervention—the French intervention in Syria in 1860 and the English intervention in Egypt in 1882. It seemed to me, therefore, that he might be trusted to oppose anything like a renewal of the old Turco-Circassian tyranny, and also to respect the independent administrative rights of the Egyptian people. His task, however, as I have said was a difficult one, indeed almost impossible. In order to give back their liberty to the fellahin, or indeed to introduce any of the reforms advocated by Arabi and his friends, it would have been necessary to reinstate, if not Arabi himself, at least a Nationalist Ministry, for the Turco-Circassian clique, which Wolseley had put back into power, were the enemies of all reform, while the Khedive himself, who had betrayed his constitutional pledges, could no longer be trusted to work honestly with a constitutional Government. He would need to be replaced by some other prince who had not forfeited the confidence of his people.

Such a course, though difficult from the Foreign Office point of view, would have met with little obstacle in Egypt itself. Indeed, it would have been a quite simple affair. Tewfik, at that time, had absolutely no friend in the country outside the circle of his own small palace clique, and hardly a voice would have been raised for him if his retirement had been insisted on as a political necessity, not even in all probability his own. Pensioned, he would not unwillingly have returned to private life, for his experience of the Khedivial dignity had not been such as to cause him to be enamoured of it. Two courses would then have been open in regard to his successor. Either the recognized order of succession might have been followed, which would have placed the present Khedive Abbas, still a child, upon the throne, under a Regency; or the older order of succession might have been reverted to, which would have given it to Prince Halim. In neither case would there have been difficulty in restoring a constitutional regime. Probably the best arrangement, if our Foreign Office could have been got to consent to it, would have been the first, with Arabi for Regent. Arabi was still, in spite of his defeat and the poor fight of it he had made at Tel-el- Kebir, most widely popular, and could have been trusted to work honestly with those plans of material and moral reform which England professed to have at heart, not indeed as Minister, for he lacked the administrative ability, but as exercising by delegation the duties of a constitutional head of the State. For that no Egyptian could have been better fitted, he being a large-minded man as well as a good Moslem. Nor would England’s legitimate influence have been a loser by it. Arabi, in spite of the quarrel forced upon him by the Foreign Office, had always refused to see an enemy in the English people. He had nursed himself to the last in the belief that, if only the British public could be got to know the truth, it could not fail to sympathize. England, it must be remembered, was traditionally believed in Egypt, prior to 1882, to be the universal patron of liberal and national movements throughout the world, and in an especial manner the friend of Islam. Arabi had been bred in that tradition, and had to the last moment, in common with most Egyptians, imagined that the quarrel was due to a mistake as to facts. The rectification of it would therefore have seemed natural to him and to all, and would have restored the general Egyptian goodwill.

For a moment we thought that Dufferin, whom the disclosures connected with the trial had made acquainted with the true history of the war, would have recommended this enlightened course, and it would have saved him and his employers at the Foreign Office much subsequent trouble had he had the courage to insist on it. He was perfectly aware of Tewfik’s real character, and he was aware also of Arabi’s merits. Indeed, so far had his confidence gone in the honesty and patriotism of the defeated National leader that he had got him at the moment of his leaving for Ceylon to draw up a Memorandum of Reform for Egypt, the text of which, though doubtless existing at the Foreign Office, has never been published. It will be found at the end of this chapter, a copy of it having been furnished to me by Arabi from Ceylon the following summer. Also I had learned from General Charles Gordon, in a conversation I had had with him, while Arabi was still in prison, in December 1882, that the idea of Arabi’s rehabilitation and recall to Egypt was at the time contemplated in Downing Street; while, as will be seen further on, I received additional confirmation of it as being in Gladstone’s mind in a message received from him as late as the summer of 1883. We were therefore not without justification in the hope we reposed in Dufferin, though it is improbable that the Foreign Office, obstinate and deeply compromised, was ever converted from its hostility to the National leader. Indeed it is pretty certain that, whatever representations of the truth Dufferin may have made or whatever new suggestions offered, the policy he was instructed by Lord Granville to pursue remained unyielding; and the publication a few months later of Dufferin’s famous despatch of 7th February did but register a foregone conclusion.[1]

Nevertheless, it is worth while to put on record what evidence we possess of a wiser and more liberal policy having been contemplated at least for a moment by some of those in power. Not to lay too much stress on the hopes held out to us by Dufferin at the time of the compromise of Arabi’s trial, which may have been dictated by an unauthorized desire to persuade us, it is certain that Arabi’s early return to Egypt was believed in not only at Cairo at the end of the year 1882, but also in London. Gordon’s evidence on this head is decisive, and shows that it was entertained in official quarters. Though looked upon in Downing Street as “not clothed in the rightest of minds,”[2] Gordon’s opinion on Egyptian affairs was considered worth taking. He was in occasional correspondence with Lord Northbrook, and he was intimate[3] with Reginald Brett (the present Lord Esher), just then transferred with Lord Hartington, whose private secretary he was, to the War Office, while Wolseley also was his friend. There was talk, too, already at the time, as we shall presently see, of Gordon’s possible return as Governor- General to the Soudan, and he was in an excellent position to hear and know. What therefore he told me in the conversation referred to cannot but be convincing of the fact. The circumstances under which it took place were these.

It will be remembered by readers of my first volume, “A Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt,” that while the campaign of Tel-el- Kebir was still in progress I received a letter from General Gordon dated Cape Town, 3rd August 1882, the text of which is there given, expressing to me the strongest sympathy with my view of the iniquitous causes of the war, and ending with the words, “As for Arabi, whatever may become of him individually, he will live for centuries in the people; they will never be ‘your obedient servants’ again.” A copy of this letter I had forwarded to Gladstone, and it had not been without effect on him in what had happened subsequently in Egypt. To Gordon I had sent in reply a printed copy of my private correspondence with Downing Street, and the article on the Egyptian Revolution, published in the September number of the “Nineteenth Century Review,” and had received a second letter from him which I here print.

“En route to England 21 _Oct._ 1882.

“MY DEAR MR. BLUNT,

“THANK you for your kind letter Sept. 7, received as I was leaving Cape Town. Sorry you have been abused, but you are not the worse because the world does so, neither are you better when it praises you. You are as you are. Thanks for XIX century and pamphlet, which I read with interest. I have a conviction that things will turn out well for the Egyptian people in the long run, and though our people may suffer, it will be for welfare of the human race. I cannot now write on the subject, for I have an idea that things are ruled for the best, by an overruling Power, and that to put any say in what He does seems presumptuous on my part; in fact if one took up the cudgels for the oppressed every-where, one would have too much to do. I may meet you some day, and perhaps can enlighten you on some subjects, such as why the Joint Note 9 Janry was written, from _my_ point of view. As for Dilke I think he is an impostor in a great measure. With kind regards. Believe me, Yrs. sincerely,

“C. G. GORDON.

“_P.S._—I have seen papers up to 26 Oct. and it seems H. M. G. have just fought to reinstate the Parasite ring of Pachas. As for Raouf and Ismail [Eyoub] Pachas’ being on Arabi’s trial, it means simply the condemnation of Arabi. I know both these two men well, they would shrink at nothing, and are the representative men of the Pacha clique.”

It was therefore natural that, on his return to England in November I should be one of the first persons upon whom the General called. My diary, which at the time I had unfortunately interrupted, fails me in regard to the exact details of the visit paid me; and I have no more than a memorandum to the effect that Gordon called at my house in James Street, Buckingham Gate, on 5th December, and that not finding me at home he left his name with my servant at the door characteristically thus: “General Gordon or Gordon Pasha. I daresay you have heard of him before”; and with it a note written on a sheet of my own paper. But this I have preserved and it fixes the date. It says: “I will call at Buckingham Gate 9 a.m. Friday, if you could be in. I sincerely hope you can recover the £4,000 you spent on Arabi [alluding to the costs of the trial]. I will give £5 a year till you are repaid. It would be a pleasure to do it and no risk, for Arabi will be back in Egypt within two years, and he will repay it. I hope that the inferior prisoners will not be forgotten, for Riaz and Co. will do their best to crush them, for Riaz’ fate depends on their extinction. My address, 68, Elm Park Road, Chelsea.”

It must have been therefore on Friday the 8th December that Gordon called again, and, as I remember well, breakfasted with us and spent the whole forenoon in talk, mainly on Egypt and the Soudan, but also on India and the relations generally between Europe and the East. With regard to Egypt my recollection is distinct that we were in entire agreement in our sympathy with the “rebellion,” and our condemnation of Tewfik. In my “Nineteenth Century” article I had engaged myself to write a sequel to it, but I remember that he advised me to leave this promise for the present unfulfilled. “You do not require it,” he said, “for your own justification, and, as for the Government, they are resolved now to do justice. You may have perfect faith in Mr. Gladstone, and I know that he intends to restore Arabi as soon as public opinion shall have cooled down, and he can do it without too sudden a reversal of his policy. Arabi will be back in Egypt in a couple of years, and you can then write your history far more effectively than now.”

This is my recollection of the visit, and it is confirmed to me on the point in question by a second note received from him at the close of the year bidding me farewell just before his leaving England for Jerusalem, which letter I have also preserved.

“5 Rockstone Place, Southampton 2, 26, 12, 82.

“MY DEAR MR. BLUNT,

“THANK you for your kind note. I am sorry not to have seen you and Lady Blunt before I left. I go tomorrow and will do my best about the Sheiks.[4] Above is my safe address. I will write you from Palestine.

“I have to a small degree tried to use the verse: ‘If thou seest the violent oppression of the poor, or the subversion of justice, marvel not at it, for the Higher than the Highest regardeth it.’ Ecc. v, 8.

“Not that I am inclined to be silent on these matters if I think I can do any good, but it comforts me to feel that one can get access to a Higher than they.

“Arabi will be back in a couple of years, say in 18 months.

“I think things are very critical in Cairo, and the day I called on you, I went to Brett and begged him to urge Government to assemble the Notables at once. Napoleon I suffered far more from the revolts of Cairo than from the troops. Colvin is to be recalled.

“Believe me with kindest regards to Lady Blunt and yourself, and with hopes for the future thro’ your efforts, Yours sincerely,

“C. G. GORDON.”

This taken with the rest is, I think, decisive. As to the Soudan, my recollection of Gordon’s talk is that he expressed himself at the time in entire sympathy with the Mahdi as the popular leader of a revolt against an iniquitous Government, but that, whereas I, sharing the views of many Egyptian Nationalists in 1882, was for giving the Soudanese complete independence, Gordon insisted on the retention of Khartoum as a necessity for Egypt in connection with the Nile water-supply, and as an outpost to be held politically. On this point alone we disagreed.

Arabi’s memorandum, drawn up for Lord Dufferin, is another important bit of evidence. It shows that at least the question of a change of Khedive had been presented to, and must have been considered by, him; nor is it to be supposed that the intention of a complete pardon for the writer can have been absent from the diplomatist to whom it was addressed. It is certain, at any rate, that Dufferin was influenced by it in his scheme of reforms, and was then favourably impressed, and to this I can testify of my own knowledge, for I more than once had opportunities in after years of learning the high opinion Dufferin entertained of the ex- National leader. The passage in the memorandum of immediate importance to the point we are considering is this:

“The question,” says the memorandum, “of appointing a new ruler (Waly) is an important one, and I will lay before you my own views and those of my comrades. I say: that the family of Ibrahim Pasha, son of Mohammed Ali, is absolutely worthless for the sovereignty; no matter how they might be controlled by a Constitution, for they are of notoriously corrupt principles. In my opinion there is a choice of two courses. 1. To appoint Halim Pasha, son of Mohammed Ali Pasha, Waly of Egypt, under the conditions before laid down [_i.e._, those of a Constitution]. He is a man who has been tried by misfortune, and has tasted the bitterness of injustice, and has reached the age of about fifty-five years, and I believe that such a man might try to win the sympathy of the people by justice and kindness. 2. The other course is to appoint as Waly for Egypt one of her own men of the National Party whose deeds have borne witness to their goodness of disposition and peaceful character. But, as to any idea of appointing a foreign ruler, I say that, as the mass of the Egyptians are Moslems, with the exception of the Coptic section (and these are the same as the Egyptians in their dealings and ways of life), I believe that the appointment of a foreign Waly would not suit the temper of the Egyptians, but would perhaps lead to trouble among them.”

This, though not conforming to strict official phraseology, goes to the root of the matter, and is full of common sense. Let us consider how it would have been if Dufferin had made the idea of such a change of ruler his own, as he made other recommendations of the memorandum his own, and had pressed it as a necessity of the Egyptian case upon the Foreign Office if an honest settlement was to be made and the British troops withdrawn from Egypt. As regards Egypt proper, the appointment of Halim would have solved the whole difficulty of popular disaffection. Halim, who was a really estimable man, bore a good repute in Egypt. His domestic life was a blameless one. His wife, a woman of high distinction with a good European education, would have helped him in his relations with the resident foreign element, and he himself was sufficiently Europeanized to play the part needed of a modern Egyptian ruler. He had none of the vices of the elder branch of the family of Mohammed Ali. He was neither a spendthrift nor a voluptuary, nor a coveter of his neighbour’s goods, nor on any point a law breaker. Moreover there would have been no difficulty in obtaining the Sultan’s consent to the appointment. Halim was in some sort the Sultan’s own candidate, as also the candidate of most of the European Powers. He could have worked easily with the National Party and the Constitution, and thus the British garrison could have been at once withdrawn. If to this had been added, what was talked of at the time, the appointment of Sir Charles Wilson as Malet’s successor at the British Agency, even a preponderance of English influence in Egypt could have been secured. Wilson was a strong sympathizer with the Nationalists, and his advice would have been followed. The suggestion of Halim was an entirely wise one, suited to every necessity of the case, as would have been the other of Abbas with Arabi for Regent.

Above all it would have saved Egypt and England from those terrible disasters which beset both countries with a pursuing curse in regard to the Soudan during the next three years. That the intervention in Egypt was the direct cause of the revolt in the Soudan is certain. One of the most fatal acts of the Dual Control had been to give to the Soudan in 1880, as Gordon’s successor, a reactionary and wholly corrupt Circassian Governor-General, Raouf Pasha, and it had been through his tyranny and incapacity that the country had fallen into disorder and the Mahdi had gained his first adherents. Two years later Arabi’s first administrative act when he became War Minister at Cairo had been to recall Raouf,[5] and send a really competent man, Abd-el-Kader Pasha, to replace him. Under Abd-el-Kader the rebellion had been localized, Khartoum scientifically fortified, and order restored everywhere but in the western provinces. Moreover Arabi had put himself into epistolary communication with the Mahdi, and had established a _modus vivendi_ between him and the National Government in view of the common menace of European and Christian aggression in Lower Egypt. It was the landing of English troops at Alexandria that gave its fanatical character to the Mahdist rebellion, while it also denuded the Soudan of its best troops recalled to Egypt to repel the menace of invasion. But for Tel-el-Kebir, the utmost misfortune that could have befallen Egypt in that direction would have been the loss of the Bahr el Ghazal province and Kordofan. Even now, after the defeat of Tel-el-Kebir, all could have been repaired had the change of Khedive been resolved on according to Arabi’s suggestion, with a recall of the Nationalist leaders, and an end put to the tyrannical Circassian regime at Cairo. Terms could easily have been come to with the Mahdi which would have secured Khartoum and the Eastern Soudan from attack. The Christian army withdrawn from Cairo, the Mahdi’s rebellion would have lost its fanatical _raison d’être_. It will be seen later that Arabi, even before the defeat of Hicks, was quite ready to abandon Kordofan and the Equatorial provinces, while there would have been no difficulty in retaining Khartoum, where the chief weakness of the garrison in 1883 lay in the fact that the troops composing it were Arabi’s ex-soldiers devoted to him and wholly disaffected to Tewfik. For the issue of bloodshed and destruction witnessed for a generation in the Soudan, the obstinacy of our Foreign Office in retaining Tewfik was directly responsible. It was one of those fatal mistakes which statesmen make and persist in because they are too proud to own their error.

Was there ever a greater tragedy of errors? And all for what? It is probable that the real reason why Tewfik was maintained in his place as Khedive, instead of being pensioned and sent to join his father in an exile more or less honourable, was neither a consideration of Egypt’s interests nor that of England’s interests, nor yet of the interests of Europe, nor so much as those of the bondholders. None of the upholders of these interests had any belief or trust in Tewfik as a prince capable of maintaining order at Cairo, or of restoring Egyptian credit, or even of efficiently serving British interests. He was known to have none of the qualities of a strong ruler, and he was popular with no one, native or European. As a puppet prince he might have his uses, but the situation demanded something more than a puppet prince, and he was good for no other purpose, political or financial. No. The probability is that the real reason with Gladstone’s Cabinet was that Tewfik’s retirement would have entailed the retirement also of Lord Granville, and Lord Granville was too popular a member of the Cabinet to be forced into such a step against his will; also that Lord Granville, a needy man, much in debt, and dependent on his official salary to eke out an insufficient income, was not prepared for the personal sacrifice. The fiction of Tewfik’s loyalty and of Arabi’s rebellion had therefore to be persisted in and upheld. It could not be contemplated that a Minister should admit an error which had been accompanied by the slaughter of thousands of peasants, and the expenditure of millions, and a war which had been boasted of as one undertaken as a “duty of honour.” Granville must have resigned if his Cabinet had belied him. There was no “political” way out of it, except for the Foreign Office to harden its heart and persevere in its accomplished wrong. This, I say, was the tragedy of the situation, and for this Egypt was sacrificed. As for Dufferin, he doubtless argued, being an old diplomatist with a career to maintain, that he had been sent to Egypt by the Foreign Office to get them out of an all but impossible scrape, but that his instructions did not include the duty of proving them fools. He therefore made his settlement on the lines prescribed. It may be said of him with truth that he missed, unwillingly, an heroic opportunity, and I think also with truth that it left him with occasional qualms of conscience which troubled him through the rest of his long and eminently successful life.

For these reasons nothing in the way of an efficient new policy was insisted on by Dufferin, or adopted by the Government, and all the rest of the programme so elaborately drawn up by him of councils and assemblies, and dignified with the name of a Constitution, was rendered impotent from the outset by being entrusted to hands the least desirous of its success and the least competent to deal with it.

We, who were watching, were not long in being undeceived in our hopes. The new year 1883 began badly. Although its actual first act at Cairo was the issuing of the decree promised us by Dufferin of a general amnesty for all connected with the “Rebellion,” and though I had received from him a private letter announcing to me the good news of the release of 450 political prisoners, for which I had duly thanked him, it soon appeared that the operation of the decree was being evaded in practice where the Khedive needed to be indulged in acts of unsatisfied vengeance on those who had specially offended him. But for this, I had intended that with the issue of the amnesty my political intervention in Egypt should end. I felt that I had done my whole duty by salvaging, as far as I could, the wreck of the National Party; I had so far succeeded in saving the lives, if not the liberty, of all concerned, and it was my thought to rely, as Gordon had advised me, on Gladstone for the rest, and to turn my energies into other channels. A very few days, however, passed before it became evident that things were going less fairly in Egypt than they seemed. About the 15th of January Napier,[6] having finished his work at Cairo, returned to London, and from him I learned that, notwithstanding the amnesty and the clearing of the prisons announced by Dufferin, a certain number of the political prisoners had been detained while others were being arrested and put on trial before special courts on charges connected with the past year. The charges brought were so-called “criminal charges” against persons implicated in the riots at Alexandria, Tantah, and other places, before or during the war, and on this pretence vengeance was being taken on political enemies by the Khedive and the Court Party. What made these prosecutions the more infamous was the fact that innocent men were being indicted for the very crimes their accusers had been themselves guilty of, and, to make the injustice of it the more glaring, some of them were being tried before military courts appointed by the very man, Omar Pasha Lutfi, now Minister of War, who with the Khedive’s connivance and suggestion had prepared the Alexandria riot not a year before. It was a “judicial atrocity” of the most shameless kind.

I therefore wrote to Dufferin a letter, the full text of which will be found in the Appendix at the end of this volume, complaining of the exceptions that had been made to the amnesty. “It would seem,” I said, “most unfair that the leaders of the ‘rebellion’ having foregone their right of being publicly defended, any of their followers or associates should be punished for rebellion. . . . I cannot understand how it can be the wish of our Government to make scapegoats of the rank and file of those charged with the criminal acts of June and July, while the chief offenders enjoy immunity. If one thing has been proved to the satisfaction of the Government more than another, it is that Omar Lutfi was responsible for the murderous character of the riots of the 11th of June, yet we read still of executions at Alexandria for crimes committed on that day by others, the chief culprit himself being the while at large, in honour, and even holding high office under the Khedive. I say nothing of the Khedive himself, though you doubtless know how little his conduct on that day would have borne investigation.”

Dufferin’s answer to this, while personally amiable, was the reverse of satisfactory. It referred me to a report drawn up by Sir Charles Wilson about the discharge of political prisoners, but ignored the real point of my remonstrance, the breach of the amnesty of which I had complained. The monstrosity of the prosecutions’ being carried on in the Khedive’s name for acts due to the Khedive’s own instigation was too delicate ground to be ventured on, and Dufferin was diplomatically silent. In the meanwhile men were being hanged, and among them, on the 5th of February, a young officer charged with being responsible for the riot at Tantah in July 1882.

The riots of Tantah, which took place a few days after the bombardment of Alexandria, were the work of the Alexandrian mob which had fled from that city. They were permitted and encouraged by the then governor of the province, Ibrahim Pasha Adhem, an adherent of the Khedive, who sought to emulate the conduct of Omar Pasha Lutfi in the Alexandrian case. The Tantah massacre would have attained very large proportions but for the intervention of Ahmed Bey Minshawi, a neighbouring fellah proprietor of great local authority, aided by Yusuf Abu Diab, one of Abd-el-Aal Pasha’s aides-de-camp, who had been sent by Arabi to protect the Christians. The governor, Ibrahim Adhem, had then been arrested by Arabi’s order, and sent a prisoner to the citadel, but on the return of the Khedive to Cairo had been reinstated in his office at Tantah and had inverted the _rôle_ of guilt in the affair. Early in the year 1883 Abu Diab had been singled out and tried for the other’s crime, and now while I was still in correspondence with Dufferin hanged at Tantah. His execution, where the truth of the affair was known to every one and where Abu Diab was highly esteemed, struck terror through the whole province. I did not hear of the case until too late to intervene; but when, a few days later, Dufferin’s unsatisfactory answer came, I resolved not to allow such another injustice to go by without public remonstrance. It is impossible that Dufferin who, though he had refused to examine into the history of the Alexandrian riot, knew in a general way how the case really lay as between the Khedive and the Nationalists, should not have suspected that this and other trials on similar charges were a perversion of justice. Also it is certain that there was a strong political interest to serve, if the Khedive was to be rehabilitated and supported, in providing him with a scapegoat for his own and his agents crimes. Nor can it be left out of view that the theory of the Nationalists’ responsibility for the riot had been made the pretext and excuse throughout by our diplomacy, and by Dufferin himself at the Constantinople Conference, for its intervention. Dufferin was no sentimentalist in politics, and could at times be hard. In this case, as in others which preceded and followed it, he contented himself with directing the formal presence of an Englishman at the trial, one unacquainted with the language, to watch it, and thus allowed the Khedive to have practically his own way.

The next case that occurred was that of the vengeance taken on a number of unfortunate Bedouins charged with the murder of Professor Palmer during the war. Palmer (see “Secret History”) had been sent by our Government, and especially by Lord Northbrook, to bribe the Bedouin tribes east of the Suez Canal, and with him Gill and Charrington, two English officers, had met their deaths in its performance. They had all three, travelling disguised, been taken prisoners and shot in the desert by order of the Egyptian governor of Nakhl, an act not of common murder but clearly of warfare, and one which should certainly have been covered by the amnesty, the business the disguised officers were on giving them the character of spies. But our Government had special reasons for resenting their death; and after the war was over an English officer, Colonel Warren, was despatched to the Sinai peninsula to “do justice” on the tribes. This duty he performed by driving in to Suez some scores of Bedouins, men, women, and children, and selecting out of them five for hanging, while the rest were retained for many months in prison as hostages for more important persons still at large. This was the same Warren who afterwards figured so lugubriously at Spion Kop in the Boer war. The true facts of the case had been brought to my knowledge by Palmer’s widow, who came to me incensed against the Government, and holding them, and especially Lord Northbrook who had sent him, responsible for her husband’s death. She now laid the whole particulars before me; and we had questions put about it in Parliament, and eventually a debate raised on the Address, and another in the House of Lords, in which Her Majesty’s Ministers rose, one after the other, and, like Ananias and Sapphira, lied valiantly in the public cause. It is a curious feature of our parliamentary conventions that so worthy and straightforward a man as the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman should have consented on this occasion to deny absolutely facts of which there was the clearest possible written proof, and of which he could not have been ignorant, in Palmer’s own handwriting, while also it concerned a sum of public money no smaller than £20,000. Lord Northbrook was the Minister really responsible and Bannerman was his Under-Secretary at the Admiralty, and to him the work of denial was given by his chief. We failed to save the Bedouins but obtained for the lady a handsome pension, and for Palmer sepulture in St. Paul’s. The whole story is instructive but has been told in my “Secret History,” and its sequel does not sufficiently concern Egyptian history to detain me here.

A third still more important case among the political hangings of the year was that of Suliman Bey Sami, the Nationalist Colonel of the Alexandria garrison, who, at the time of the riots, had come down with his regiment and put an end to the massacre in spite of the conniving civil Governor, Omar Pasha Lutfi. Omar Lutfi was a strong partisan of the Khedive, and the resentment of the Court party was, for this reason, especially keen against Sami. It was a case precisely on the same lines as that of Abu Diab, except that the charge brought against Sami was not in regard to his conduct at the time of the riot, but for having set fire to Alexandria during the bombardment a month later. It is especially disgraceful to our Government that this man should have been hanged with their connivance, and by a court-martial appointed by this very Omar Lutfi, because the charge brought against him concerned one of their own political fictions, namely, that Alexandria was set fire to not at all by the guns of the British fleet, but solely by the Egyptians, a fiction in which they had not only a political but also a pecuniary interest, involving responsibility for the three millions sterling indemnity claimed by the victims of the bombardment. The hanging, moreover, was the clearest possible breach of the amnesty, for Suliman’s act had the perfectly legitimate excuse of warfare, as one designed to cover the retreat of the Egyptian army. Here the case was so strong a one against the Government that I was able to secure the help of that really efficient fighter in the House of Commons, Lord Randolph Churchill, an occasion memorable to me as the beginning of a valuable political friendship long preserved.

Randolph Churchill was an extraordinarily interesting young man, the most attractive at that time in English public life, the head of the little group of four Tories in the House of Commons which went by the name of the Fourth Party. Until the spring of 1883 I had not come across him personally. He had been kept away from the House during the whole earlier session of 1882 by illness, and I had not had the good fortune of securing his help. I have often thought that but for the accident of his illness that spring, when the Egyptian crisis occurred, the whole trouble and discredit of the bombardment and the war might have been prevented, for it needed nothing but a powerful and persistent voice on the Opposition side in Parliament to deter Mr. Gladstone from an enterprise so strangely at variance with his life-long teaching. Unfortunately, such a voice had not been available. The members of Mr. Gladstone’s own party did not dare, with the single exception of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, to reproach him with the necessary courage, and as for the Tory Opposition, not one of them had the wisdom to take with him a humanitarian line, the only one which could have convinced him of his folly.

In the short autumn session, Churchill had reappeared and had given courage to his followers, and they had helped us in getting a fair trial for the vanquished “rebels,” Churchill himself generously subscribing to the Arabi defence fund. But so far we had not personally met. Now, however, in my anger at the barbarities which were being committed in Egypt, and by the advice of my friends, especially Lady Gregory and my cousin, Algernon Bourke, who was still on the staff of the “Times” (see “Secret History”) I turned to Churchill as the one man capable of dealing in Parliament effectively with the case. Dufferin, his mission ended, had turned his back on Egypt, and the small local protection given by his presence was no more to be had. It was an urgent necessity, if these black doings were to be stopped, that the home Government should be at once subjected to vigorous and even violent remonstrance, and that Gladstone should be attacked individually as the responsible author of the atrocities due to his intervention. In his younger days Gladstone had denounced the State crimes of Bourbon rule in Naples with its arrests, imprisonments, and sanguinary political punishments, and it was urgent now that some one should stand up in the House and remind him of his more reputable past, and shame him from the countenance his agents were giving to the same State crimes in Egypt. Churchill in his place below the gangway was the man for this. He was “spoiling,” I was told, “for a fight,” and to him in my new need I turned as the one knight errant on whom I could quite rely.

I like to remember Lord Randolph as I then first saw him one afternoon in May when, by appointment, I met him to discuss the situation at some rooms in the Strand where a chess tournament was going on. Chess was one of his few hobbies, and he had asked me to meet him there. At the time of which I speak he was, with no very regular features, a distinctly good-looking young man, smartly dressed and with a certain distinction of manner which marked him from the common herd. He was of ordinary height—by no means the dwarf his caricatures suggest—well built and well set up, his face a pleasant one, eyes full of intelligence, though rather _à fleur de tête_, while his mouth, overhung with a strong moustache curling up above his cheeks, gave an aggressive tone to his countenance it would not otherwise have had. In colour he was then, as always, rather pale, with a look of ill-health which later increased from year to year, a symptom of the constitutional weakness of which he so prematurely died. There was no lack, however, as yet of virility in his movements or gestures. On the contrary, it was just the vital force in him which was the chief attraction and the frank irresponsibility in all he did and said. Indeed, it was difficult when conversing with him, even after he had become a Cabinet Minister, to regard him as a quite serious statesman—a glorified schoolboy rather, ready still to rob an orchard or tie a cracker to the head master’s coattail. This simplicity of speech and pleasant humour, joined to a high-bred courtesy with strangers, made him a favourite, especially with young men nor only of his own class in England, while, as I afterwards found, it opened to him no less the doors of confidence in the minds of the many Orientals whom I brought to see him—minds usually suspicious of Englishmen, and slow to reveal their thoughts. He had none of that arrogant coldness that so much repels these, nor again of that abruptness of address which is apt to frighten them, as birds are frightened at any too sudden movement. Such visitors never failed after an interview with Churchill to speak to me enthusiastically in his praise. To myself he was invariably charming. My somewhat romantic view of politics, so little like his own, attracted him, and my knowledge of the East, of which he was as yet ignorant; and, being some ten years his senior in age, I was able to inspire him almost from the beginning of our intercourse with new ideas, enlarging his political horizon, and as I have always been glad to think, encouraging him in the humaner paths of public virtue. To these he was already in a vague way inclined, and on the occasion of our first meeting I had no difficulty in persuading him to take up the Egyptian patriotic case, the more so because it gave him an opportunity for immediate action in Parliament most damaging to the Government. He found it a pleasant fancy, when I suggested it to him, that he should array himself in the Grand Old Man’s Midlothian garments, left as it were outside a tavern door, and preach to him to his face of “righteousness and temperance and a judgement to come.”

With Churchill’s assistance I was able to enlist other strong helpers, Drummond Wolff, who was the member of the Fourth Party specially affected to foreign affairs, and Gorst (Sir John) its legal adviser—both men of great ability and political courage. Outside their radius, too, I had for friends in the House of Commons Robert Bourke,[7] who represented foreign affairs on the Opposition front bench; Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the most honest man in Parliament; and Labouchere, whom I had known in my old diplomatic days as a fellow attaché, and who was now leader of the extreme Radical division below the gangway. All these were good men and true in a parliamentary fight, and, working together, could be counted on to force the official entrenchments of the Government, and make the Grand Old Man the object of daily attacks which should convince him of his shame. We had good help, too, from the Irish party, and it had been O’Donnell who had opened the campaign for us with the Palmer case.

Thanks especially to Churchill’s energy that summer, and to the great publicity he was able to give to the Khedive’s connection with the riots, I have the satisfaction of remembering that we succeeded at last in putting a stop to the worst barbarities of the restored regime at Cairo, nor was any further political hanging after that summer permitted as long as Gladstone remained in office. The experience of the past year, however, left me wholly sceptical of the good faith of either our Cairo diplomacy or the London Foreign Office, and permanently estranged me from that vast official machinery of the British Empire which, I now came to see, maintained its power in the East only by a system of mingled lying, force, and fraud repellent to common honesty and equally demoralizing to the governors and those it governed. It was in this mood that Dufferin’s famous “Charter” of Egypt’s liberty found me when at last I read it in the pages of a new Blue Book.

I reproduce from among my papers the following interesting letter from Lady Gregory[8] which admirably describes our common feeling about the charter at the time we read it. It was written just when I was seeking to bring forward the charges against the Khedive, and when Dufferin, having returned to England, was using his influence with the press to get the charge hushed up. It is too good and instructive a letter not to be printed here in full.

(Undated but written at the beginning of May 1883.)

“I am curious to hear what you think of Lord Dufferin’s despatch. It reminds me of what someone of the ancients said of human life, ‘a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.’

“I am very sorry I did not know you had not seen Lord Dufferin’s despatch. I read it, and sent it off yesterday to Sir William, but would have sent it to you first if I had known. It would not, however, do much to put you in good spirits. There are some good suggestions in it, taken from Arabi’s programme, such as a National Bank to come between the people and the usurers, and a reform in the working of the Cadastre. But for all evils his remedy is: Put in more Europeans. Of course when the country is well stocked with English surveyors and judges and engineers it will be necessary to keep English troops there to protect them. I would rather they annexed at once. There would be less hypocrisy about it. He winds up with a panegyric on Nubar, Sherif and Riaz and alludes in terms of admiration to Sultan Pasha and calls the Khedive amiable and benevolent. So you may imagine the style of the document, in which there are poetic allusions to Memnon and Pactolus and a great flourish about putting the house-tax on Europeans, and this ridiculous Parliament which is to have no hold on the purse strings and will be of course useless, but sounds well. I don’t blame Lord Dufferin so much. Of course the Government told him what was expected of him, but he might just as well have drawn up this prose poem at Therapia without going to Egypt at all.

“I enclose copy of your statement which I am keeping for the present. I have seen Chenery[9] to-day and talked the matter over with him, but Lord Dufferin has been beforehand with me! having already interviewed him and, as if he knew what was coming, persuaded him that any attack on the Khedive would add immense difficulty to the action of the Government just now—that, whatever his faults may be, he has promised to support English policy, and that for the interests of the Empire it is much better to let bygones be bygones—and that the ‘Times’ is such a very important paper that anything that appeared in it against Tewfik would at once be made use of by the French, and within two hours be telegraphed to the Khedive, who would believe the Government and the ‘Times’ were the same thing—that this is a time of change in Egypt, a new man being sent there and a new start made and the less stir made about what had already occurred there the better. This is also Lord Granville’s view!

“Poor Chenery had then to listen to my appeal as to whether Arabi’s character was never to be cleared from the slurs cast upon it by Gladstone and Dilke in the House, and never withdrawn, just to save the Khedive whom no one has any opinion of, and he became agitated after reading your statement and said that if it were true the Khedive ought to be hanged—but that at the same time, for the reasons given before, he is very doubtful whether he ought to publish it, even in a letter from you. In the end he said that, if you would modify as far as possible the _personal_ attack on the Khedive and add a paragraph laying the crime more on the Palace party than on him and make it as much as possible a defence of Arabi rather than an indictment of Tewfik, he would see if he could publish it, though not binding himself by a promise, and if he could not would return it to you in time to publish it elsewhere, as I told him it must be out by the 11th. He was very kind and I think was really anxious to be amiable, and spoke most affectionately of you, and I really don’t blame him for not wishing to quarrel with the Government. Indeed I was hopeless from the time I heard Lord Dufferin had taken him in hand. What are we against him?

Don’t seek to hinder him

Or to bewilder him

Sure he’s a pilgrim

From the Blarney stone!

“I told Sir William all this and he is pretty sure Chenery will be afraid to print it in any form, and I should be very unwilling to take away any of the force of the accusation against Tewfik. I thought all the more of its importance from Chenery being so afraid of the effect it might have. Sir William and I both think that if you could get Lord Randolph to make the statement in the House it would be your best course, as it would thus gain publicity, and the Tories at all events might take it up. Do you think this will be possible? I should not like you to publish it in any paper but the ‘Times.’ Chenery talked cheerfully of a ‘little pamphlet,’ but that was of course to prevent the little foundling being laid on his own doorstep.”

My own impression of Dufferin’s charter, and his famous dispatch expounding it, was little different from that here quoted. It was obvious to all of us who knew anything of Egypt that in the present condition of things there, under the restored regime of Tewfik and the Turco-Circassian Pashas maintained in power by a British army and allowed to imprison and hang whom they would, where there was neither freedom of speech nor of the press, and where all political society was honeycombed with spies, the talk of giving back liberty to the Egyptians was in the nature of a sorry jest. The Queen’s speech which had ushered it in on the opening of Parliament had been a mere repetition of all the old Foreign Office platitudes of the previous years. Her Majesty had been made by Gladstone’s Cabinet to say: “The reconstitution of Egypt and the reorganization of its affairs under the authority of the Khedive have in part been accomplished, and will continue to receive my earnest attention. It will be my endeavour to secure that full provision shall be made for the exigencies of order, for a just representation of the wants and wishes of the population, and for the observance of international obligations,” a programme more meagre than that of the previous year, in which “the prudent development of Egyptian institutions” had been promised, with the result of Egypt’s parliament having been crushed and abolished six months later by a British army. What was it possible to hope from the liberalism of a government which had restored the absolute power of a Prince so detested by his subjects that it needed British bayonets to keep him on his throne? Dufferin’s charter, to be made a reality, called for a change of Khedive as a first condition of its success, and of this no sign whatever had been given. To talk of granting a Constitution, as a novelty, to a people who had just been robbed of their Constitution, and whose constitutional leaders had been ruined and driven into exile, could be only a mockery; and as such it appeared to us. Dufferin had indeed been a “pilgrim from the Blarney stone.”

MEMORANDUM OF REFORMS FOR EGYPT DRAWN UP AT LORD DUFFERIN’S REQUEST BY AHMED ARABI PASHA, DECEMBER 1882 (EXACT DATE NOT GIVEN)

1. The Constitution granted to the Egyptian Nation of 7th February 1882 should be confirmed.

2. Rules should be laid down as to the limiting of the power of whoever may be appointed Ruler of Egypt, so that he shall no longer be an absolute Ruler.

3. Rules should also be laid down as to the Ministers and Heads of Departments, so that each should have conditions imposed on him which he could not transgress.

4. A Mejlis or Council of Elders should be formed as a Body of Appeal on important questions where differences shall have occurred between the Government and the Chamber of Representatives.

5. New regulations should be issued for the reorganization of the various administrative departments, so that each Department or Province or Office should have so many officials of assigned rank belonging to it, at fixed salaries liable neither to increase nor to decrease, with regulations as to promotion according as vacancies occur through resignation or death or for any other natural reason.

_Remark._—Public offices in Egypt have hitherto been conducted on no fixed rule, but every Minister or Governor or Chief of Police has done with his administration as he pleased, dismissing or promoting all under him without inquiry, and removing officials from post to post according to his fancy, so that the budget has always exceeded what was right, and increased from year to year without sufficient reason; this it is which has caused yearly deficits in the budget.

6. Rules should be made to control the action of the police so that they should cease to interfere with the judicial inquiry into cases, as now is done, but each police station should have a small Council to deal with cases in its own district and refer them to the tribunals of First Instance for decision. The police should appear in the character of prosecutors only.

7. Municipalities should be formed in Cairo, Alexandria, and other considerable Egyptian towns, as may be suited to each town, and the funds raised by dues in each town should be kept in the treasury of each Administration to be spent on improvements for that town only, such as mending roads, repairing public buildings, lighting the town with gas, supplying water, erecting slaughter-houses, hospitals, and public markets for the sale of whatever produce is brought in from the country, and on whatever else may be of advantage to the town or prevent its injury.

8. Rules shall be laid down to control the transactions of the small and the large banks, and to fix the maximum rate of interest all over Egypt.

_Remark._—The banks themselves are at present the cause of the ruin and destruction and misery which have fallen upon the indigent fellah.

9. Tribunals shall be instituted all over Egypt with the formation of the High Courts, one of them at Cairo, the other at Alexandria, the members of both of which shall be chosen from among the Native and Foreign Notables; and it shall be their function to pronounce final decisions. Rules shall be laid down for the guidance of these Courts suitable to the country.

10. The Consular jurisdictions shall be abolished, and all suits concerning foreigners inhabiting Egypt shall be tried before the abovementioned tribunals.

11. All foreigners inhabiting Egypt shall be on an equal footing with the natives in paying taxes and customs duties, and all such imposts as are incumbent on the natives.

12. The Mixed Tribunals shall be abolished, the Courts abovementioned being sufficient.

13. The official language in all parts of the country shall be Arabic.

14. Egypt shall remain dependent on the Ottoman Porte as she is now, inasmuch as we know that the hearts of the Egyptians are in sympathy with the Porte. But inasmuch as the shoulders of Egypt are burdened with debts, and as the situation demands such a diminution of the debt, as will be mentioned below, so also it becomes necessary to diminish and limit the yearly tribute paid to the Porte to the amount imposed upon Egypt in the time of Mohammed Ali Pasha, considering, too, that at that time Egypt had no debt.

15. The Suez Canal shall be under the protection of the European powers generally and jointly.

16. Slavery shall be abolished absolutely and permanently.

17. The Sudan ought to remain a dependency of Egypt, and that because it has a fertile climate; and, if a railway were made to Khartoum, it would become the great centre of commerce for the Sudan and the East, and it would begin to be gradually civilized.

18. A rule should be made determining the conditions according to which everyone, whether native or foreign, is employed in the Egyptian public administration, and the term of his service and retirement and promotion and dismissal shall be fixed.

19. The assessment of taxes in general must be reformed, and the customs duties, because they are based at present on inequitable principles.

20. All these administrations, of which the revenues are mortgaged for the Egyptian debt, such as railways, ports, Governorships, the Municipality in Cairo, and the Administrations of the Domains and the Daira Sanieh, shall revert to the Government, in order that they (the Government) may administer these revenues as they think best, and may refund the surplus to the Treasury of the Malieh, inasmuch as the continuance of those administrations under present conditions is a yearly loss to the Egyptian Treasury.

21. The Caisse de la Dette shall be abolished, the Treasury of the Malieh being sufficient.

22. The Egyptian Debt must be unified and diminished to 50 millions sterling, at an interest of 3 per cent. yearly, so that the Egyptian Government shall be itself a guarantee for the payment of the instalments when due, and those instalments shall be paid at the dates fixed, and those dates shall be fixed at the end of the harvest, winter and summer.

23. A commission shall be formed of eminent engineers and men of science and art to repair ancient Arab buildings which have begun to decay, and to restore them to their original condition, taking care to preserve the hieroglyphics and temples and monuments of ancient Egypt, and to examine them and put them in order, and to build a large museum to receive the Egyptian and Arab antiquities.

24. The native schools in the towns and villages shall be put in order and made accessible for the education of children of both sexes and the spread of knowledge and civilization.

25. A real Budget shall be drawn up each year with great accuracy, so that the Government may know its exact revenue, as also its expenses. These should be reckoned each year, after the necessary reforms shall have been decided on. Three months before the end of each financial year there shall be an inspection of the surplus cash in the Treasury of the Malieh remaining after payment of all expenses; and this sum shall be divided into two portions, according to circumstances—one of them to be applied to paying off a part of the original capital of the Debt, and the other to reclaiming lands suitable for cultivation.

26. The question of appointing a new Ruler (Waly) is an important one, and I will lay before you my own views and those of my comrades. I say: That the family of Ibrahim Pasha, son of Mohammed Ali, is absolutely worthless for the sovereignty, no matter how they might be controlled by a constitution, for they are people of notoriously corrupt principles.

In my opinion there is a choice of two courses:

1. To appoint Halim Pasha, son of Mohammed Ali Pasha, as Waly for Egypt under the conditions above laid down. He is a man who has been tried by misfortunes, and has tasted the bitterness of injustice, and has reached the age of about 55 years, and I believe that such a man may try to win the sympathy of the people by justice and kindness.

2. The other to appoint as Waly for Egypt one of her own men of the national party, whose deeds have borne witness to their goodness of disposition and peaceful character. But as to any idea of appointing a foreign Ruler, I say that, as the mass of the Egyptians are Moslems, with the exception of the small section of Copts, and these also are the same as the Egyptians in their dealings and ways of life, I believe that the appointment of a foreign Waly would not suit the character of the Egyptians, but that it would perhaps cause trouble among them. As to the regard to be had for the interests of foreigners, I say that when equitable tribunals shall have been formed, with the High Courts previously mentioned, those Courts will themselves guarantee the interests of natives and foreigners together, for it has hitherto been unheard of that any Egyptian should wrong a foreigner.