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Secret history of the English occupation of Egypt

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt · English · Gutenberg #41373 · 1,011,118 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Secret history of the English occupation of Egypt
        being a personal narrative of events

Author: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
        Aḥmad ʻUrābī


        
Release date: November 16, 2012 [eBook #41373]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SECRET HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH OCCUPATION OF EGYPT ***

    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.

    Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
    OE ligatures have been expanded.




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


 PREFACE OF 1895                                 vii

 PREFACE ON PUBLICATION, 1907                     ix

     I. EGYPT UNDER ISMAÏL                         1

    II. SIR RIVERS WILSON'S MISSION               19

   III. TRAVELS IN ARABIA AND INDIA               38

    IV. ENGLISH POLITICS IN 1880                  51

     V. THE REFORM LEADERS AT THE AZHAR           73

    VI. BEGINNINGS OF THE REVOLUTION IN EGYPT     92

   VII. TRIUMPH OF THE REFORMERS IN EGYPT        109

  VIII. GAMBETTA'S POLICY. THE JOINT NOTE        129

    IX. FALL OF SHERIF PASHA                     146

     X. MY PLEADING IN DOWNING STREET            162

    XI. THE CIRCASSIAN PLOT                      186

   XII. INTRIGUES AND COUNTER INTRIGUES          210

  XIII. DERVISH'S MISSION                        228

   XIV. A LAST APPEAL TO GLADSTONE               251

    XV. THE BOMBARDMENT OF ALEXANDRIA            270

   XVI. THE CAMPAIGN OF TEL-EL-KEBIR             285

  XVII. THE ARABI TRIAL                          323

 XVIII. DUFFERIN'S MISSION                       349


 APPENDICES

     I. ARABI'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY                    367

    II. TEXT OF NATIONAL PROGRAMME               383

   III. TEXT OF EGYPTIAN CONSTITUTION OF 1882    388

    IV. LETTER FROM BOGHOS PASHA NUBAR           397

     V. NOTE AS TO THE BERLIN CONGRESS           401

    VI. THE WIND AND THE WHIRLWIND               404




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 Coeur 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 VI. 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 Schouvaloff 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 religi

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