FOOTNOTES:
[6] It is worth recording that while at Aleppo on this occasion we made friends with two English officers afterwards prominently connected with Egypt and the Soudanese war, Colonel Stewart, who shared with Gordon in the defence of Khartoum against the Mahdi, and Colonel Sir Charles Wilson who succeeded to the command of the British army at Metemneh after the battle of Abu Klea. Stewart, at my suggestion, made a tour that summer among the Anazeh and Shammar Bedouins, but failed to get on good terms with them, the truth being that he was quite out of sympathy with Orientals. Wilson, a man of far wider ideals, accompanied us on our homeward journey as far as Smyrna, which we reached in the time of Midhat Pasha's arrest. Both were at that date Consuls in Asia Minor of the perambulating kind provided by the terms of the Cyprus Convention.
[CHAPTER VI]
BEGINNINGS OF THE REVOLUTION IN EGYPT
The summer of 1881 I spent almost entirely at Crabbet, writing the book which was the fruit of my winter experience: "The Future of Islam." It was composed somewhat in haste and under circumstances unfavourable to deliberate judgment, for in the very act of writing it, events crowded so closely on events, and portents upon portents that a calm forecast of Islam's destiny seemed at times almost impossible. Nevertheless, and in spite of many defects, I look upon the work as still of serious value, if only historically, as showing the condition of the Mohammedan hopes and fears of the day when it was written. In it I committed myself without reserve to the Cause of Islam as essentially the "Cause of Good" over an immense portion of the world, and to be encouraged, not repressed, by all who cared for the welfare of mankind. I gave an historical sketch of its origin, its glories, and its apparent decay, a decay which was very similar to that which had seemed to overtake Christendom four hundred years before, and which might be met as Christendom had met its troubles by a religious reformation and the freeing of its thought from the bondage of a too strict tradition impeding its evolution. I expounded the ideas, as I had learned them from Sheykh Abdu, of the liberal school of teaching, and appealed to all that was best among my own countrymen to sympathize with their hopes as against the party of reaction which, hide-bound in the old and evil ways, had nothing to offer but a recrudescence of fanaticism and a last desperate appeal against its many enemies to the sword. To England especially, as interested so largely in the future of Islam through India, I addressed myself, urging that her policy should be an active one of friendship with the better elements of Eastern thought in its struggle with the worse, not merely to profit by its decay for the extension of her own material interests. "The main point," I said, "is that England should fulfil the trust she has accepted (by her inheritance of the Mogul Empire and her long connection with Ottoman affairs) of developing, not destroying the existing elements of good in Asia. She cannot destroy Islam or dissolve her own connection with her. Therefore, in God's name, let her take Islam by the hand and encourage her boldly in the path of virtue. This is the only worthy course and the only wise one, wiser and worthier, I venture to assert, than a whole century of crusade."
The chapters of this little volume, as they came out in monthly numbers of the "Fortnightly Review," produced a considerable effect in England and also among the English-reading Moslems of India, and found their way, to some extent, in translation to Egypt. Already, while I was writing them, it had become clear that great events were imminent in the Mohammedan world and were even now in progress. Early in May the French Government with hardly a note of warning, and in pursuance of the secret arrangement made at Berlin three years before between M. Waddington and our Foreign Office, invaded Tunis and, on the fanciful pretext of protecting the Bey from a quite unreal danger threatened him by his subjects, occupied the western portion of the Regency and proclaimed a French Protectorate. This sudden act of aggression on a perfectly inoffensive and harmless neighbour was justified by nothing in the condition of the province either in the way of ill government or danger to Europeans or even financial embarrassment. The Bey himself was a mild and respectable personage, and had in no way forfeited the goodwill of his people. The seizure of his person by General Bréart, and the usurpation of his authority by the French Republic was an act of cynical illegality almost without parallel in the history of modern aggression upon weaker nations, if we except the invasion of Egypt by Bonaparte in 1799, and was generally condemned in England where the history of the Berlin betrayal was not as yet suspected. In the Mohammedan world it lit a flame of anger and dismay which gathered in intensity as the truth became slowly known. The western Tunisians, taken wholly by surprise at first, had hardly fired a shot against the French, and the Bey had been forced to sign the Treaty presented to him at the sword's point by Bréart, which surrendered the independence of the Regency, before the real state of the case came to be understood. But in the eastern provinces the tribes of the desert took up arms, and before the middle of summer the revolt had spread to the Algerian Sahara and a wave of anger against Christendom was rolling eastwards which, as will be seen, had begun to affect Egypt dangerously, and remains in truth to this day responsible for precipitating the action of the liberal reformers there and of the army in demanding self government.
It is worth noting, as showing the complicity of our Government in this scandalous affair, that Lord Granville allowed himself to be content with an assurance given him by the French Government, that the occupation of the Regency was only for the restoration of order, though it was patent that order had not been so much as threatened, and that it would not continue a day longer than might be necessary to secure the safety of the Bey's Government—a line of falsehood closely imitated by Lord Granville himself the following year when the positions of France and England were reversed in Egypt. It is most noticeable too that, though Parliament was sitting at the time, Lord Salisbury, the leader of the opposition, maintained an absolute silence about Tunis, though his followers, who did not know his secret reasons, were clamorous for explanations. Bismarck was equally silent at Berlin, and no single Power of those who had been represented at Berlin dissented, though the Italian public was deeply aggrieved by the French action. The Sultan alone of them recorded his public protest, Tunis having been always reckoned as part of the Ottoman dominions. By the European Governments it was accepted speedily as a fait accompli.
The history of the rise of what in the summer of 1881 began to be known as the Egyptian National movement needs here to be told. It had its origin as a practical idea in the last desperate efforts made by the Khedive Ismaïl when he had quarrelled with Wilson to maintain himself in power against the consular tutelage in which he had, by his folly and his debts, placed himself. He sought to recover the moral status he had lost and the goodwill of his subjects by making to them a popular appeal for support, and in the spring of 1879 he proclaimed his intention of calling together an assembly of Notables. There is little doubt that his intention was, under the cloak of a national demand, to repudiate at least a portion of the debt, and though no one in Egypt, except perhaps certain European residents, thought him sincere, the idea of a constitutional form of government as a remedy for the ills they were suffering began from that time to be popularized at Cairo. Sheykhs Jemal-ed-din and his school had always maintained that the growing absolutism of Mohammedan princes in modern times was contrary to the spirit of Islam which in its essence was a Republic where every Moslem had the right of free speech in its assemblies, and where the authority of the ruler rested on his conformity to the law and on popular approval. Ismaïl was condemned by the Azhar reformers on the double ground of his being a breaker of the law and a political tyrant. In the spring of 1879 it had been much discussed among them in private how, and by what means, he could be deposed or even, if there were no other way, removed by assassination. It was the consciousness of his double peril, both at home and from Europe, and of the opinions held at the Azhar that determined him to appear as a Constitutionalist. Constitutionalism, it must, moreover, be remembered, was much in the air just then not only in Egypt, but at Constantinople, where an assembly had met convoked by decree of the Sultan only five years before. Little, therefore, as Ismaïl was trusted by the Reformers, his new move was one of which they could not but approve, and it was taken up and expounded by such printed organs of opinion as had furtively begun to be established at Cairo under their direction. Apart from the Azhar, there were not a few of the high officials who at this time were Constitutionalists, notably Sherif Pasha, Ali Pasha Mubarak and Mahmud Bey Sami el Barodi. Nor was this all. The Khedive's heir apparent and eventual successor, Mohammed Tewfik, had come under Jemal-ed-din's potent influence, and through him was in close communication with the Reformers, and had given them repeated pledges that if ever he came to the Khedivial throne he would govern on strictly constitutional lines. Ismaïl's latest Ministry, which lasted three months, included Tewfik and Sherif, Constitutionalists both, and they were actually in charge of the administration when the old Khedive was deposed.
Tewfik's accession was therefore greeted by Jemal-ed-din and the Reformers as a stroke of good fortune, and, though they regretted that it had not been in the power of the Egyptians themselves to depose the tyrant, they looked forward to the new régime with the confident expectation of men who had at last obtained a lever to their wishes. The new Khedive, however, like many another heir apparent when he has succeeded to power, was not long in changing his opinion, and a month had hardly elapsed before he had forgotten his promises and betrayed his friends. Tewfik's character was one of extreme weakness. The son of a woman who had been a servant only in his father's house, he had been from his childhood treated as of small account by Ismaïl and brought up by his mother in bodily fear of the unscrupulous Khedive, and in those habits of insincerity and dissimulation which in the East are the traditional safeguards of the unprotected. He had grown up in this way, in the harem more than with men, and had been unable to rid himself of a certain womanish timidity which prompted him always to yield his opinion in the presence of a stronger will than his own, and after yielding, to regain his ground, if possible, by indirect means and covertly as is the habit of women. He had, too, a large share of the womanish quality of jealousy and of the love of small vengeances. Otherwise, in his domestic life he was well-conducted as compared with most of his predecessors, and not unadorned with respectable virtues. As a ruler his was too negative a character not to be a danger to those who had to deal with him. His first impulse was always to conceal the truth and to place upon others the blame of any failure that might have occurred by his fault. His resentments were shown not by open displeasure, but by tale-bearing and false suggestion and the setting of one against another where he desired to prevail or be revenged. It has been said of him that he was never sincere, and that no one ever trusted him who was not betrayed.
When therefore on his accession Tewfik found himself placed between two forces with opposite ends in view, the force of his reforming friends urging him to fulfil his constitutional promises, and the force of the consulates forbidding him to part with any of his power, a power they intended to exercise in his name themselves, he consented first to his Minister Sherif's suggestion that he should issue a decree granting a Constitution and then at the instance of the Consuls refused to sign it. This led to Sherif's resignation, and the substitution in his place of a nominee of the Consulates, Riaz Pasha, on whom these counted to carry out their ideas of financial reform while leaving him full power, under the Rescript of 1878, to carry on the internal administration as he would, without check from any Council or Assembly, in the Khedive's name. The weakness shown by the Khedive in this, the first important decision of his reign, was the cause of all his future troubles. Had he remained loyal to his promises to the Reformers and to his Ministers, and summoned at that time a Council of Notables, he would have had his subjects enthusiastically with him and would have been spared the intrigues and counter intrigues which marked the next two years and prepared the way for the revolution of 1882. As it was, he found himself by his compliance deprived of all authority, and treated as a mere dummy prince by Consuls whose will he had obeyed and by his new Minister.
The character of Riaz has been much debated. At the time of my visit to Egypt in the autumn of 1881, his name was in execration with the Nationalists as the author of the violent but abortive measures which had been taken for their repression, but as I now think in part unjustly. Riaz was a man of the old régime and as such a disbeliever in any but the most absolute forms of government, and he carried on the administration while in power according to the received methods which had prevailed in Ismaïl's time, by espionage, police rule, arrests, and deportations. But he was neither unjust nor personally cruel, and he was certainly animated throughout his public career by a real sense of patriotism. His idea in taking office under the joint control of the English and French Consulates, and the assistance he gave them in opposition to the popular will, was, as he has since assured me, simply to recover Egypt from its financial misfortunes and redeem the debt and so get rid as speedily as possible of the foreign intervention, nor is there any doubt that in the first year of his being in office great progress had been made in relieving the fellahin from their financial burdens. But the process of redemption must in any case have been a very slow one, and there is no probability that he would have succeeded either in freeing Egypt from the tutelage imposed on it or even of seeing the grosser evils of the administration which still weighed upon the people sensibly relieved. The régime of the Joint Control which Riaz served looked solely to finance and troubled itself hardly at all about other matters. The fellahin were still governed mainly by the kurbash, the courts of justice were abominably corrupt, the landed classes were universally in debt and were losing their lands to their creditors, and the alien caste of Turks and Circassians still lorded it over the whole country. There was no sign during the period of anything in the shape of moral improvement encouraged by the Government or even of improvement in the administrative system. This was the weak side of the Anglo-French régime and the cause of its failure to win popular favour. Nevertheless, it may be questioned whether the crisis would have come as speedily as it did, but for the Khedive's own insincerities and intrigues against his Minister. It was his character, as I have explained, to yield outwardly to pressure but at the same time to seek to regain his end by other means. Thus it happened that he had hardly taken Riaz to his counsels before he began to intrigue against him. He was jealous of his authority and grudged the power that he had given to his too independent Minister. This is the true history of the series of crises through which Egypt passed in 1881, including, to a large extent, the military troubles which ended in Riaz' fall from power.
The intervention of the army during the winter of 1880-81 as a political force in Egypt is so important a matter that it needs careful explanation. As an element of discontent, it may be said to date from the disastrous campaign in Abyssinia which destroyed in it the Khedivial prestige, and at the same time by the financial difficulties it had involved made the pay of the soldiers precarious and irregular. The men who returned from the campaign had no longer any respect for their generals who had shown themselves incompetent, and the subordinate officers for the most part made common cause against them with the men. This came about the more naturally because the higher posts in the army were occupied exclusively by the Turkish-speaking "Circassian" class which at that time monopolized official power, while the common soldiers and the officers to the rank of captain were almost as exclusively drawn from the Arabic-speaking fellahin population. The class feeling became strong when it was precisely these that were mulcted of their pay, while the Circassians continued to enjoy their much larger salaries undiminished. During the last three years, therefore, of Ismaïl's reign the rank and file of the army had fully shared the general discontent of the country, and there had been conspiracies, never made public, among the lower officers which at one moment very nearly came to the point of violent action. A leader in this class feeling in the army was, as early as 1877, Ahmed Bey Arabi, whose rank as lieutenant-colonel, a very unusual one to be held by a fellah, gave him a position of exceptional influence with his Arabic-speaking fellow countrymen. A short biography of this remarkable man will not be here out of place.
Arabi was born in 1840, the son of a small village sheykh, the owner of eight and a half acres of land, at Horiyeh, near Zagazig, where his family had been long established and enjoyed a certain local consideration of a semi-religious kind. Like many other village sheykhs they claimed a strain of Seyyid blood in their otherwise purely fellah lineage, and had a tradition of being, on that account, somewhat superior to their rustic neighbours. How far this claim was a valid one—and it has been disputed—I do not know, but it had at least the effect of giving them a desire for better religious education than is to be found in the Delta villages, and Arabi, like his father, was sent as a youth to Cairo and was a student there for two years at the Azhar. At the age of fourteen he was taken for a soldier, and as he was a tall, well-grown lad and Saïd Pasha, the then Viceroy, had a scheme for training the sons of village sheykhs as officers, he was pushed on through the lower ranks of the army, and at the early age of seventeen became lieutenant, captain at eighteen, major at nineteen, and Caimakam, lieutenant-colonel, at twenty. This rapid and unexampled advancement in the case of a fellah was due in part to the protection of the French general under whom he was serving, Suliman Pasha el Franzawi, but still more to the favour shown by the Viceroy, who affected to be, like the mass of his subjects, an Egyptian, not merely a member of the alien Turkish caste, and wished to have fellah officers about him. Arabi, a presentable young fellow, even so far enjoyed his favour as to be named his A. D. C., and in this capacity he accompanied Saïd to Medina the year before his death. It was during this close intercourse with the Viceroy that he acquired his first political ideas, which were those of equality as between class and class, and of the respect due to the fellah as the preponderating element in Egyptian nationality. It is this particular advocacy of fellah rights which distinguished Arabi from the other reformers of his day. The Azhar movement was one of general Mohammedan reform, without distinction of race. Arabi's was essentially a race movement and as such far more distinctly national and destined to be far more popular.
The unexpected death of his master, Saïd, was a great blow to Arabi's hopes. Under Ismaïl the favour shown to the fellah officers was withdrawn, and all preferment was once more given to the Circassians. Arabi found himself treated with scant courtesy by these, and was given only subordinate duties to perform in the transport service and semi-civilian posts. This threw him into the ranks of the discontented and made him more than ever the advocate of the rights of his own class. He was eloquent and able to expound his views in the sort of language his countrymen understood and appreciated, not very precise language perhaps, but illustrated with tropes and metaphors and texts from the Koran, which his Azhar education supplied. He thus exercised a considerable influence over those with whom he came in contact. During this period he came a good deal into the society of Europeans, especially at Alexandria, where he had been sent on business, not altogether military, connected with the Khedive's Daïra. His relations with these were friendly, and throughout his career he remained free from the least taint of fanatical intolerance in regard to Christians. On points of religion, though his practice was strict, he belonged to the largest and most liberal school of Mohammedan interpretation, and he was essentially a humanitarian in his ideas of the fraternity of nations and creeds. He knew no language, however, but his own, and maintained his integrity free from the European vices which are so easily acquired.
In the Abyssinian war Arabi saw some service, but only on the communication lines between Massawa and the front, and he returned from the campaign like all the rest, incensed at the way in which it had been mismanaged. It was this that turned his attention decidedly to politics and gave a wider scope to his indignation now principally directed against the Khedive. This was intensified when he found himself arrested, with another fellah officer, Ali Bey Roubi, on a false charge of having been concerned in the attack on Nubar, a manœuvre of Ismaïl's intended to screen his own part in the affair; and, after his release, he for a moment joined with others in a plan which, however, came to nothing, of deposing the Khedive. It is probable that, if Europe had not intervened when it did, this result would have ultimately happened, either through the action of the army or perhaps by Ismaïl's assassination, for such a solution too was at one time seriously discussed at the Azhar. All the Reforming party it is certain, and the soldiers with them, rejoiced at Ismaïl's downfall. It is a mistake also to suppose that Arabi was at the outset hostile to the new régime. Neither with Tewfik nor with the European Consuls had he the smallest quarrel. On the contrary, he saw in Tewfik a friendly influence, and in the Consuls protectors for the fellahin from their old oppressors. Moreover, he had obtained the command of a regiment of the guard, and was quartered where he would most have desired to be, in the Abbassiyeh barracks at Cairo. Had moderate prudence been used in dealing with the soldiers' very real grievances, and a War Minister less hostile to the fellah officers been appointed, there is every reason to believe that neither he nor any of his fellow officers would have thought of taking up an attitude hostile to the Government. Action in self defence was forced upon them, and for this the Khedive's jealousy of Riaz was mainly responsible.
The trouble came about in this way: when the new Ministry under Riaz was formed, Osman Rifky, a Turkish pasha of the old school, was made Minister of War. He was an extreme representative of the class which for centuries had looked upon Egypt as their property and the fellahin as their slaves and servants. His attitude, therefore, towards the fellah officers was from the first a hostile one, and in the appointments made by him it was to the Circassian, not the fellah, element in the army that preference was always given. The soldiers too were angry at being made use of for purposes outside their military duty, and subjected to a kind of corvée of hard labour such as the digging of canals and agricultural work on the Khedivial estates, to which they had become unaccustomed, and it was for taking their part and refusing to allow the men of his regiment to be ordered away to dig the Towfikiyeh Canal that Arabi first incurred the Minister's displeasure. There were questions too of pay withheld which called for redress, and on the 20th of May, 1880, a first petition was sent in by the fellah officers, of whom Arabi was one, setting forth their grievances.
The address included nothing political, and was made in proper form to the Ministry of War, and led, through the intervention of the French and English Consuls, to an official inquiry which proved the justice of the complaints. In this matter the French Consul, M. de Ring, took the part, as was just, of the officers, and from that time gave them to a certain extent his protection, especially when during the course of the Inquiry he had found himself in personal altercation with Riaz. Arabi in all this, while taking a leading part, was prudent and moderate, and his conduct was approved by the Consuls. Since his return to Cairo, as Colonel of the Fourth Regiment, he had renewed his acquaintance with the reformers of the Azhar and the Constitutional party, and through a mutual friend and Arabi's fellow officer Ali Bey Roubi, was in communication with two of the Ministers, Ali Pasha Mubarak and Mahmud Bey Sami. These, though Constitutionalists and adherents of Sherif Pasha, had retained their places as Ministers of Public Works and Religious Foundations (Awkaf) when Sherif had been dismissed. By Mahmud Sami, Arabi and the fellah officers were especially befriended.
It was in this conjuncture of affairs that the Khedive, seeing in it the elements of an intrigue against Riaz, put himself in communication with the officers through the intermediary of his A. D. C., Ali Bey Fehmi, an officer of fellah origin but attached through his Circassian wife to the Palace, and Colonel of the 1st regiment of the Guard. This Ali Fehmi was a very worthy young officer, and though he had not taken any part in the petition sent in to the Ministry and was without political bias, was already on friendly terms with Arabi and the rest, and had no difficulty in persuading them that the Khedive too was on their side in the quarrel, and had sent him to warn them that worse things were being designed against them by Osman Rifky and Riaz, and that unless they could procure the dismissal of these they would always be in danger. Arabi was the easier persuaded of this because Riaz had already had many of the Constitutionalists arrested, and some of these had been friends of his own. Sheykh Jemal-ed-din had been summarily dealt with, and a young landowner of the Sherkiyeh, Hassan Mousa el Akkad, a special friend of Arabi, had been deported only a short time before to the White Nile, for the mere reason that in response to an invitation publicly made by Sir Rivers Wilson he had petitioned against the Moukabalah confiscation. It was therefore suggested to the officers that they should be beforehand with Osman Rifky and should petition for his dismissal, a request which the Khedive would view favourably.
The affair came to a crisis about the end of the year 1880, when one evening, Arabi being with other officers at the house of Nejm el Din Pasha, he learned that it had been decided at the Ministry that he and his fellow Colonel of the Black Regiment, Abd-el-Aal Bey Helmi, were to be deprived of their commands and dismissed the service; and almost at the same time news was brought him that Ali Fehmi was at his own house and desired to see him. On returning home, therefore, he found Ali Fehmi waiting for him, and with him Abd-el-Aal who confirmed what he had heard, and after taking counsel it was decided that they should all three together—for Ali Fehmi expressed himself willing to throw in his lot with theirs—go to the Prime Minister and insist upon an end being put to their persecution by the dismissal of Osman Rifky; and this the next day they did. Arabi's own account given to me of their interview with Riaz is interesting and I have no doubt correct: "We went," he says, "with our petition to the Ministry of the Interior and asked to see Riaz. We were shown into an outer room and waited while the Minister read our document in the inner room. Presently he came out. 'Your petition,' he said, 'is muhlik, a hanging matter. What is it you want? to change the Ministry? And what would you put in its place? Whom do you propose to carry on the government?' And I answered him, 'Ya saat el Basha, is Egypt then a woman who has borne but eight sons and then become barren?' By this I meant himself and the seven Ministers under him. He was angry at this, but in the end said he would see into our affair, and so we left him."
At the Council of Ministers which assembled immediately after this incident the Khedive played a treacherous part. In order to involve the Ministry in an open quarrel with the officers, in which he knew the officers would have M. de Ring's protection, he proposed that they should be arrested and placed upon their trial by Court Martial, but to this Osman Rifky objected because he also would thus be put on trial, while Riaz was against making it a case of public scandal at all, and took the officers' part. It was pointed out however to Riaz privately that his opposition would be misinterpreted, and would be looked upon as an act disloyal to the Khedive, and he withdrew his opposition, and a compromise was come to according to which Osman Rifky was to be left to deal with the officers summarily, and according to methods common in Ismaïl's reign. No open action therefore was taken against the officers, and the case was left undecided by the Council.
What followed is well known. Some days later the three Colonels who had signed the petition received an invitation to attend at the Kasr el Nil Palace to arrange with the Minister what part their regiment should take in some festivities which were being organized for the Princess Jamila's wedding. Arrived there, they found a number of their superior officers, Circassians, with Osman Rifky, and were at once arrested, disarmed, and insulted. Arabi has always maintained that it was intended to put them on board a steamer which was lying in the river outside, and have them conveyed up the Nile and drowned; and I see no reason to doubt that this was the case. Osman Rifky's object was to avoid a trial, which would have exposed his own tyrannical proceedings, and it would doubtless have been reported that the officers had been dismissed the service and gone to their homes. Be this however as it may, they were speedily released by the soldiers of Ali Fehmi's regiment, who, under the command of their major, Mohammed Obeyd, a good and loyal man who was afterwards killed at Tel-el-Kebir, marched down on news being brought and forced the Palace doors. The Circassian Generals then beat a retreat as they best could, and Osman Rifky was forced to an undignified flight through a ground-floor window, whereupon the three Colonels marched back at the head of their troops, and with drums beating, to their barracks. Here they drew up a letter telling what had happened, and explaining that their action had been one of self-defence only, and in no way endangered the safety of any one, and addressed it to M. de Ring, begging his intercession with the Khedive, and that another Minister might be appointed in Osman Rifky's place, to which in the course of the day the Khedive readily acceded. It is certain, however, that he and M. de Ring together made a strong effort to get Riaz also dismissed, on the plea that as Prime Minister he was principally responsible for the disorder which had happened. Nevertheless Riaz was too strongly supported by the Financial Controllers and by the German Consul General, and, I think, by Malet, who was at that time, as I have recorded, by no means favourably disposed to the officers, and on the matter being referred to London and Paris the Khedive's wish was disregarded, and shortly after M. de Ring was recalled by his Government in disgrace.
The date of this first military disturbance at the Kasr el Nil was 1st February, 1881. It took place while I was still in Egypt, but after I had left Cairo, and I do not remember to have heard Arabi's name mentioned before it happened. The public part, however, that he played that brought him into immediate notoriety, and at once his name was in all men's mouths as that of a man who had been able successfully to defy the Government and bring about a change of Ministers. His position in a very few weeks became one of power in the country, or at least of imputed power, and, as the custom is in Egypt, petitions of all kinds poured in upon him from persons who had suffered wrong and who sought his aid to get justice. The fact that he had appeared in the affair as champion of fellah wrongs against the Turkish ruling class gave him popularity outside of Cairo, and many of the Notables and country sheykhs put themselves into communication with him. To all he returned what good answers he could and help as far as his limited power extended, and wherever men met him his fine presence, attractive smile, and dignified eloquence in conversation conveyed a favourable impression.
In personal appearance Arabi was at that time singularly well endowed for the part he was called upon to play in Egyptian history as representative of his race. A typical fellah, tall, heavy-limbed, and somewhat slow in his movements, he seemed to symbolize that massive bodily strength which is so characteristic of the laborious peasant of the Lower Nile. He had nothing in him of the alertness of a soldier, and there was a certain deliberation in his gesture which gave him the dignity one so often sees in village sheykhs. His features in repose were dull, and his eyes had an abstracted look like those of a dreamer, and it was only when he smiled and spoke that one saw the kindly and large intelligence within. Then his face became illumined as a dull landscape by the sun. To Turkish and Circassian pashas this type of man seemed wholly negligible, that of the peasant boor they had for generations dominated and held in slavery and forced to labour for them without pay, and it seemed impossible to them he should be used otherwise than as a tool in their astute hands. Riaz from first to last despised him, and even the intellectual Reformers of the Azhar took little count of him as a political force. But with his own peasant class his rusticity was all in his favour. He was one of themselves, they perceived, but with their special qualities intensified and made glorious by the power they credited him with, and by the semi-religious culture he had acquired at the Azhar superior to their own. It must be remembered that in all Egyptian history, for at least three hundred years, no mere fellah had ever risen to a position of any political eminence in Egypt, or had appeared in the light of a reformer, or whispered a word of possible revolt. I doubt, however, whether his qualities alone, which were after all rather negative ones, or his talents, of which he had as yet given no proof, would have sufficed to bring him to the front as a National leader, but for the unwise persecution to which he was subjected by Riaz in the months following the affair of Kasr el Nil, and which, through the intrigues of the Minister's political enemies, he was always able to thwart and circumvent. The most important of these, and the man in the best position to warn him of his dangers was the new Minister of War, Mahmud Bey Sami, who, through M. de Ring's influence, had been given Osman Rifky's succession, and who, as one of the ex-Minister Sherif's party, was a strong Constitutionalist. Though not personally acquainted with Arabi hitherto, he had already been friendly disposed towards him, and with one of the fellah officers, Ali Bey Roubi, he was on terms of intimacy. Having become Minister of War, he was in a position to help them actively, and to give them notice of designs against them such as came to his ears; and he was able to do this the more effectively because he still saw little of Arabi personally, though remaining in touch with him through Ali Roubi. He had made the officers a general promise that if at any time the Khedive joined actively against them they would know it, even if he did not warn them directly, by his retirement from the Ministry.
Mahmud Samiel Barodi's part in the revolution of that year was a determining one in the course it took. Of a Circassian family long established in the country, and so of the traditional ruling class, he was, like Sherif Pasha, a reformer and a patriot. Intellectually, he was far superior to Arabi, and was indeed one of the most cultivated intelligences in Egypt, with a good knowledge of literature, both Arabic and Turkish, and especially of Egyptian history, besides being an elegant and distinguished poet. English writers, following the lead, or mislead, of the Blue Books, talk of him only as an intriguer, but he was something much more than this, and it must be remembered that in intriguing, as he undoubtedly did here against Riaz, he acted against a Minister who was of a different party from his own, and whom he had not elected to serve. At the time Riaz took office in 1879, Mahmud Sami was already in the Ministry, and there had been an understanding that he and Ali Mubarak, who were Constitutionalists, should remain on an independent footing as far as their own departments were concerned. In the spring of 1881 they were both undoubtedly intriguing against Riaz, but it was with the object of restoring their own party chief Sherif Pasha, to power. This puts a different complexion upon Mahmud Sami's action, and I fancy might find many a parallel in the annals of our own English Cabinets. His part, as I see it, throughout the troubles that were coming was a perfectly loyal one, both to the Constitutional and the National cause, and he paid dearer for his constancy, for he was a rich man and so had more to lose, than any other concerned in the rebellion.
The Khedive's part in the next seven months was far less straightforward. He seems throughout to have been torn with irresolutions, jealousies, fears, and ambitions. Riaz' enemies had suggested to him that that masterful Minister was plotting against him to supplant him as Khedive, an altogether absurd suspicion which he nevertheless at times gave ear to. At other times Arabi's growing popularity aroused his jealousy, and he was constantly shifting from one dread to the other, while his ambition was to regain his own or rather his father's lost authority. The Anglo-French control irked him sorely, and he knew that by the bulk of his subjects he was disliked and despised. His Circassian entourage, the men of his Court, were all violent against the fellah officers and were constantly urging him to take strong measures against them, while Sherif Pasha and the Constitutionalists were for his making use of them on the lines already attempted to get rid of Riaz and the Consular subjection in which he lay, by another military demonstration. Such was the state of things in the month of August when the general ferment in the Mohammedan world, caused by the French invasion of Tunis, brought matters at Cairo to a definite crisis.
[CHAPTER VII]
TRIUMPH OF THE REFORMERS IN EGYPT
It is difficult to determine the precise part played by the Khedive in the final act of the revolutionary drama, the military demonstration of the 9th September at Abdin Palace. According to Ninet and certain other writers there was a complete pre-arrangement and community of action between Tewfik that day and the military leaders with the object of bringing about the fall of Riaz and with it of the Consular tutelage in which Tewfik found himself enmeshed. But this is only true in a general sense. Arabi himself has always assured me that during the summer of 1881 he had no personal relations with the Khedive beyond those official ones which his service as colonel of one of the guard regiments entailed. He only on three occasions had speech with His Highness, and on these no political subject was touched on between them. At the same time it is quite certain that the idea of a demonstration with the objects named had been suggested from time to time during the summer by Tewfik to the officers through the intermediary of his A. D. C., Ali Fehmi. Ali Fehmi, though he had been concerned with Arabi in the affairs of the Kasr-el-Nil and had been arrested with him, was none the less received back into the Khedive's favour, who thought to make use of him still in the double capacity of spy on the fellah officers and intermediary, if he required it, with them. Ali Fehmi's connection with the Court through his marriage seemed to Tewfik a guarantee of his fidelity, and it was on account of his ultimately siding entirely with Arabi, notwithstanding his Court connection, that Tewfik's resentment was afterwards so bitter against him. Tewfik, however, was a man, as we have seen him, of varying moods, and while he still counted on the help of the army to rid himself of Riaz he was also swayed by occasional fits of jealousy of Arabi's rapidly growing popularity. This popularity was very marked all through the summer months and brought him into communication with innumerable country sheykhs and Notables to whom the idea of fellah emancipation which he preached was naturally congenial. He began to be talked of in the provinces as "el wahhíd" the "only one," and in truth he deserved the appellation, for he was the only man of purely fellah origin who had for centuries been able to resist successfully the tyranny of the reigning Turco-Circassian caste.
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the National movement of 1881 was essentially a fellah movement, having for its object the emancipation of the fellahin, and that it was directed primarily against the iniquitous Turkish Government, which had ruined the country, and only incidentally against the Anglo-French control when this last declared itself openly the ally and supporter of that tyranny. Other interests, however, naturally joined in with the movement; and besides being sought out by the fellah Notables, Arabi soon found himself approached as an ally by the professed Constitutionalists, many of whom were members of the ruling caste, and were at heart as much opposed to fellah liberty as was Riaz himself. The idea of a Constitution in the minds of men of this class was one in which the supreme power, though taken from the Khedive, should remain in the hands of the Turco-Circassian oligarchy, the only ones they considered capable of governing the country. The chief of these Turkish Constitutionalists was Sherif Pasha, and the course of the summer found him in indirect but close correspondence with Arabi as the means of bringing about the Constitution which should be the road for him to a resumption of office. Arabi, always sympathetic to the Constitutional plan, lent himself readily to the idea, and the more so because Sultan Pasha, the most powerful of the fellah Notables, was himself a strong Constitutionalist, and acted as intermediary between him and Sherif. It was arranged between them all that, when a favourable moment should occur, Arabi should add the weight of the army's influence to any pressure that it might be necessary to bring to bear upon the Khedive to obtain his consent to the Constitutional demand. Nor was the Khedive by any means averse from the thing demanded, as it necessarily included the dismissal of Riaz, an object still to him of prime importance; and, at the time when this feeling predominated in his mind, he, through Ali Fehmi, encouraged Arabi to go forward with his plan and assured him of his approval.
The first message received by Arabi in this sense was one very characteristic of Tewfik's indirect and timid methods of intrigue. Speaking one day with Ali Fehmi about the growing power of the army as a political influence, he said: "You three, Arabi, Abd-el-Aal, and yourself, are three soldiers—with me you make four." And he bade him deliver this declaration as a message to Arabi. It was followed by hints far more direct, so that it was soon accepted as certain that any demonstration that might be made by the army which should demand Riaz' dismissal would have the Khedive's secret approval if not his open favour. It was necessary, in order to put constraint upon the Consuls, that the Khedive should seem to yield to a physical necessity when consenting to a change of Ministers.
Nevertheless, when the moment for action actually arrived, it was far from certain what line the Khedive would take. The crisis came about in this way. In the month of August Riaz Pasha, who up to then had despised the fellah movement too completely to think it at all dangerous, became for the first time alarmed. The part in it played by the soldiers he had thought to be able to cope with by some of those irregular methods which are the time-honoured tradition of Turkish Government. He had beset Arabi and his fellow colonels with spies and had sought constantly to involve them through the police in some personal quarrel or street disturbance which should put them in his power, but always in vain. The soldiers invariably received warning of any serious design through their friend at the War Office, Mahmud Sami, and were constantly on their guard. It had been arranged, too, between Mahmud Sami and Arabi that if ever the Minister should be forced to retire from the War Office, it would be a sign to the fellah officers that they must expect the worst, even if they should hear nothing of it from himself. When, therefore, in August Riaz, losing patience, quarrelled with the War Minister and it was announced that Mahmud Sami had resigned, the officers saw that the moment for action, as far as they were themselves concerned, could not long be delayed. Riaz had insisted with Mahmud Sami on the banishment of the two leading colonels with their regiments from Cairo and had got the Khedive, in one of his fits of jealousy at Arabi's popularity, to go with him in ordering it, and when Mahmud Sami demurred, his dismissal had been summarily announced to him. The Khedive and Riaz were at the time away still for the summer season at Alexandria, and Mahmud Sami, in his disgrace, had been ordered by letter to leave Cairo at once for his village, and so had not had time to communicate with his military friends. These, nevertheless, knew that trouble was in store for them, and it was the more apparent because Mahmud Sami's successor was no other than a certain Circassian general of the worst reactionary type, Daoud Pasha Yeghen, the Khedive's brother-in-law, whom they knew to be especially their enemy. In the first days of September the Court returned to Cairo, and the colonels, having taken counsel only with Sultan Pasha and their most intimate civilian allies, prepared for immediate action. They were resolved that, which way soever the Khedive might now be inclined towards them, they would carry out the projected demonstration and insist on a change of Ministry as a guarantee of their personal security. They saw plainly enough that if they allowed themselves to be separated from each other and removed from Cairo it would be an easy matter for Riaz to ruin them in detail. The least they might expect at his hands would be dismissal from the service, and it was far more likely that they would be arrested and tried for mutiny in connection with their doings in February. It was part, too, of their program to obtain an increase of the army, and they added to it a demand of the Constitution, which seemed to all the only permanent guarantee against arbitrary government.
The crisis came suddenly on the 8th of September. Daoud Pasha, who like most men of his class held the fellah officers in supreme contempt and who anticipated no resistance from them, issued his order for the departure of the two regiments, Arabi's to Alexandria and Abd-el-Aal's to Damietta, and on receiving it the colonels decided upon instant action. That they counted upon the Khedive's tolerance, if not his sympathy, is certain, and they knew his weak character too well to doubt that, whatever he might have resolved on in counsel with Riaz the day before, on the day of trial he would be found on the side of the strongest battalions. All they were in any real anxiety about was the attitude of Ali Fehmi, though on him too they counted as almost certainly a friend. Ali Fehmi and his regiment, the first of the guard, had been excepted from the Ministerial order of removal from Cairo, and was still quartered at Abdin barracks, and if the Khedive was really hostile to them, and Ali obedient to orders, the result might be a conflict. Otherwise the demonstration had all the probability of being a pacific one. In order, however, to minimize the risk of a misunderstanding they sent word in writing to the Khedive apprising him of their plans, and as a proof that there was no hostility intended to himself declared that they would not march to his residence in the Ismaïlyeh quarter but to Abdin, the official palace, and begged him there to meet them and hear their complaints.
The rest may be best told in Arabi's own words: "The next morning," he says in his most complete account of the affair, "I wrote a letter stating our demands and sent it to the Khedive at Ismaïlyeh Palace saying that we should march to Abdin Palace at the Asr (mid-afternoon) there to receive his answer. And the reason of our going to Abdin, and not to Ismaïlyeh where he lived, was that Abdin was his public residence, and we did not wish to alarm the ladies of his household. But if he had not come to Abdin we should have marched on to Ismaïlyeh. When, therefore, the Khedive received our message he sent for Riaz Pasha and Khairi Pasha and Stone Pasha (the American), and they went first to Abdin barracks, where both the Khedive and Riaz Pasha spoke to the soldiers, and they gave orders to Ali Fehmi that he should, with his regiment, occupy the palace of Abdin. And Ali Fehmi assented, and he posted his men in the upper rooms out of sight, so that they should be ready to fire at us from the windows. But I do not know whether they were given ball cartridge or not. Then the Khedive, with the Generals, went on to the Kaláa (citadel), and they spoke to the soldiers there in the same sense, calling on Fuda Bey to support the Khedive against us, the Khedive scolding him and threatening 'I shall put you in prison.' But the soldiers surrounded the carriage, and the Khedive was afraid and drove away. And he went on by the advice of Riaz to Abbassiyeh to speak to me. But I had already marched with my regiment by the Hassaniyeh quarter to Abdin. And they stopped to ask about the artillery and were told that it also had gone to Abdin.
"And when the Khedive arrived at Abdin he found us occupying the square, the artillery and cavalry being before the west entrance and I with my troops before the main entrance. And already when I arrived before the Palace I had sent to Ali Fehmi who, I had heard, was there and had spoken with him and he had withdrawn his men from the Palace, and they and Ali Fehmi stood with us. And the Khedive entered by the back door on the east side, and presently he came out to us with his Generals and aides-de-camp, but I did not see Colvin with him though he may have been there. And the Khedive called on me to dismount and I dismounted. And he called on me to put up my sword, and I put up my sword; but the officers, my friends, approached with me to prevent treachery, about fifty in number, and some of them placed themselves between him and the palace. And, when I had delivered my message and made my three demands to the Khedive, he said 'I am Khedive of the country and I shall do as I please' (in the Egyptian patois) 'ana Khedeywi el beled, wa amal zay ma inni awze.' I replied, 'We are not slaves and shall never from this day forth be inherited' (nahnu ma abid, wa la nurithu bad el yom). That is to say, 'We shall never be, as slaves are, subject to being bequeathed by will from one master to another.' He said nothing more, but turned and went back into the palace. And presently they sent out Cookson to me with an interpreter, and he asked why, being a soldier, I made demand of a parliament. And I said that it was to put an end to arbitrary rule, and I pointed to the crowd of citizens supporting us behind the soldiers. Then he threatened me, saying 'But we will bring a British army'; and much discussion took place between us. And he returned six or seven times to the palace, and came out again six or seven times to me, until finally he informed me that the Khedive had agreed to all. And the Khedive mentioned Haidar Pasha to replace Riaz, but I would not consent. And when it was put to me to say it, I named Sherif Pasha, because he had declared himself in favour of a Mejliss-el Nawwab, Council of Notables. I had known Sherif a little in former years when he was serving in the army. And the same evening the Khedive sent for me, and I went to him at the Ismaïlia Palace, and I thanked him for having agreed to our requests, but he said only: 'That is enough, go now and occupy Abdin, but let it be without music in the streets.'"
This seems to me a very straightforward account and agrees with everything else that I have been able to learn about the events of the day from native evidence, and even in a general way with the Blue Books. The Khedive's part in it was, according to its showing, hardly heroic, but it was less a case with him of physical cowardice than the English official account suggests. He knew perfectly well that he ran no danger from the soldiers, nor was there anything they had asked of him that he was not quite willing to grant or at least to promise. He stood, as they say, to win in either event, and was in the secret of much that, to Cookson and Colvin, was altogether a mystery.
These two Englishmen, mentioned by Arabi, were respectively Sir Charles Cookson, the British Consul at Alexandria temporarily in charge of the English Agency in Malet's absence on leave at Cairo, and Sir Auckland Colvin, the English Financial Controller. They were almost the sole representatives of the Foreign official body then in Egypt—for M. de Sinkiewicz, the new French Minister, had not yet arrived, and M. de Blignières, Colvin's French colleague, was also away. They had, therefore, the leading part to play in advising the Khedive and reporting the matter home. Colvin, an Indian official with the traditions of the Anglo-Indian art of government, and being quite unsuspicious of the semi-understanding there was between Tewfik and the officers, was all for violent measures, and recommended that the Khedive should adopt such an attitude towards them as might have been taken successfully by Mohammed Ali sixty years before, but was quite unsuited to the actual circumstances. His advice was that he should without more than a short parley shoot Arabi with a pistol with his own hand. Cookson, who knew Tewfik's timidity better, though he also was ignorant of his partial collusion with the officers, was for compromise, and effected precisely that solution which Tewfik had schemed so long to obtain, namely, the dismissal of Riaz and the recall of Sherif. His account of the affair may be read with profit in the Blue Books, as also Colvin's narrative of it in the "Times," to which he communicated the account published, and in the "Pall Mall Gazette," of which he was the regular correspondent. The publicity thus given to their action gained the thanks of the English Government for both officials, and for Colvin the honour of a knighthood and a political position in Egypt he did not till that time possess. And so the matter ended. Riaz, who with the recollection of Nubar's and Osman Rifky's adventures had taken no part in the discussion with the soldiers but had remained prudently inside the Palace, received that evening his dismissal and retired to Alexandria and thence to Europe to remain there till help should come to him from the protecting Powers; and Sherif Pasha, after some show of reluctance, was installed Prime Minister in his stead. All Egypt woke next morning to learn that not merely a revolt but a revolution had been effected, and that the long reign of arbitrary rule was, as it hoped, for ever at an end. The Khedive had promised to assemble the Notables and grant a Constitution, and henceforth the land of the Pharaohs and the Mamelukes and the Turkish Pashas was to be ruled according to the laws of justice and administered not by aliens but by the representatives of the Egyptian people themselves.
The three months which followed this notable event were the happiest time, politically, that Egypt has ever known. I am glad that I had the privilege of witnessing it with my own eyes and so that I know it not merely by hearsay, or I should doubt its reality, so little like was it to anything that I had hitherto seen or am likely, I fear, ever to see again. All native parties and, for the moment, the whole population of Cairo were united in the realization of a great national idea, the Khedive no less it seemed than the rest. He was delighted, now the crisis was over, in the success of his plot for getting rid of Riaz, and with him the most irksome features of the Dual Control, and he trusted in Sherif to rid him sooner or later of Arabi. Sherif and the Turkish liberal magnates were no less elated at their return to power, and even the reactionary Turks, who were by no means at one with Riaz, shared in what they considered a triumph against Europe. The soldiers were relieved of the incubus of danger which had so long weighed on them, and the civilian reformers rejoiced at the civil liberties they now looked on as assured. Those who had most doubted and held back longest acknowledged that the appeal to force with its bloodless victory had been justified by results. Throughout Egypt a cry of jubilation arose such as for hundreds of years had not been heard upon the Nile, and it is literally true that in the streets of Cairo men stopped each other, though strangers, to embrace and rejoice together at the astonishing new reign of liberty which had suddenly begun for them, like the dawn of day after a long night of fear. The Press, under Sheykh Mohammed Abdu's enlightened censorship, freed more than ever from its old trammels, spread the news rapidly, and men at last could meet and speak fearlessly everywhere in the provinces without the dread of spies or of police interference. All classes were infected with the same happy spirit, Moslems, Christians, Jews, men of all religions and all races, including not a few Europeans of those at all intimately connected with native life. Even the foreign Consuls could not but confess that the new régime was better than the old, that Riaz had made mistakes, and that Arabi, if he had not been wholly right, had at least not been wholly wrong.
Arabi's attitude both towards the Khedive and towards the new Ministers was correct and dignified. He had several interviews with Tewfik which, at any rate on Arabi's side, were of a most cordial character, while with the Sherif and Mahmud Sami (restored as Minister of War) he showed himself perfectly willing, now his work was done and the liberty of the country obtained, to stand aside and leave its development to his civilian friends. All his speeches of that time—and some of them are to be read in the Blue Books—are in this reasonable sense and reveal him as deeply imbued with those lofty and romantic humanitarian views which were a leading feature of his political career. There is not a trace in them of anything but a large-minded sympathy with men of all classes and creeds, nor is it possible to detect unfriendliness even to the European financial control whose beneficial influence on Egypt he, on the contrary, cheerfully acknowledges. The old régime of Turkish absolutism is past and done with—that is the theme of most of the speeches—and a new era of national freedom, peace, and goodwill to all men has begun. On the 2nd of October, a fortnight after Sherif's installation at the Ministry, we find Arabi leaving Cairo with his regiment for Ras-el-Wady amid the universal enthusiasm of a grateful city.
There was only one cloud at that date visible on the Egyptian horizon, the possible hostility of the Sultan to the idea of a Constitution. Abdul Hamid, after playing for a while with Constitutionalism at Constantinople, had shown himself at last its implacable enemy, and that very summer had ordered the mock trial and condemnation of Midhat, its most prominent advocate. The appearance, therefore, of a Special Commission at Cairo early in October representing the Sultan and instructed to inquire into what was happening in Egypt disturbed, to a certain extent, men's minds, and doubtless hastened the departure both of Arabi to Ras-el-Wady and of Abd-el-Aal to Damietta. The visit, however, of the Commissioners passed off quietly. The new Ministers were able to explain that in the political movement which was now avowedly a national one, no disloyalty was intended to the Sultan. On the contrary, the fate of Tunis had convinced the Egyptians that their only safety from European aggression lay in strengthening, not loosening, the link which bound them to the Ottoman Empire, and that in reality the object of the Revolution had been to prevent further encroachments by the Financial Control of France and England on Egypt's political independence. All was for the best, and the country was now content and pacified. Ali Pasha Nizami, the chief commissioner, was consequently able to take back with him a favourable report of the situation, and this was strengthened by the second commissioner, Ahmed Pasha Ratib, who had an opportunity of personal talk with Arabi on his way to Suez and Mecca.
This interview, which had important consequences later for the growth of the political situation, took place in the train between Zagazig and Tel-el-Kebir, Arabi had assured me on his part an accidental one, he having gone to Zagazig to visit his friends Ahmed Eff. Shemsi and Suliman Pasha Abaza and being on his way home. "As I was returning," he has told me, "by train to Ras-el-Wady it happened that Ahmed Pasha Ratib was on his way to Suez, for he was going on to Mecca on pilgrimage. And I found myself in the same carriage with him, and we exchanged compliments as strangers, and I asked him his name and he asked me my name, and he told me of his pilgrimage and other things. But he did not speak of his mission to the Khedive, nor did I ask. But I told him I was loyal to the Sultan as the head of our religion, and I also related to him all that had occurred, and he said, 'You did well.' And at Ras-el-Wady I left him, and he sent me a Koran from Jeddah, and later, on his return to Stamboul, he wrote to me, saying that he had spoken favourably of me to the Sultan, and finally I received the letter dictated by the Sultan to Sheykh Mohammed Zaffer telling me the things you know of." The Ottoman Commission therefore passed off without leading to any immediate trouble. It was coincident with the arrival at Alexandria of a French and an English gunboat, which had been ordered there by the two Governments at the moment of receiving the news of the demonstration at Abdin; and the gunboats and the commissioners left on the same day in October. Malet by this time had returned to his post, and so had Sinkiewicz, and it was agreed between them that the situation needed no active intervention. Malet indeed wrote at that time in the most favourable terms to his Government both of the new Ministers and of Arabi, whose honesty and patriotism, though he had had no personal communication with him, he was now inclined to believe in.
It was at this junction of affairs in Egypt that early in November I returned to Cairo. I had had no recent news from my Azhar friends, and was ignorant of what had happened there during the summer beyond what all the world knew, and it was not even my intention when leaving London to do more than pass through the Suez Canal on my way back (for such was again my plan for the winter) to Arabia. I had been deeply interested in the crisis which was being witnessed throughout the Mohammedan world, and I still hoped to be able to take some personal part in the great events I saw impending—I hardly knew what, except that it should be as a helper in the cause of Arabian and Mohammedan liberty. When the revolt took place in Algeria in connection with the French aggression on Tunis, I had written to my friend Seyyid Mohammed Abd-el-Kader at Damascus asking him for an introduction to its leader, Abu Yemama, but this he had not been able to give, and I had also tried in vain to discover Sheykh Jemal-ed-din Afghani's whereabouts in America, where, after wandering two years in India, he was said to be, and now my thoughts were once more turned to Arabia which I had come to look upon as a sacred land, the cradle of Eastern liberty and true religion. Strangely enough, I did not suspect that in the National movement in Egypt the chief interest for me in Islam already lay, as it were, close to my hand, and it was a mere accident that determined my taking any part in what was coming there, even as a spectator.
The reason for my blindness and indifference was that in England the events of September had been represented in the Press as purely military, and even at the Foreign Office there was no knowledge of their true significance. I share with most lovers of liberty a distrust of professional soldiers as the champions of any cause not that of tyranny, and I found it difficult to believe, even as far as Malet did, that Arabi had an honest purpose in what he had done. I knew also that Sheykh Mohammed Abdu and the rest of my Azhar friends were for other methods than those of violence, and that the reforms they had so long been preaching would in their opinion take a lifetime to achieve. It seemed impossible to understand that the events of a single summer should have brought them already to maturity. As to the promised Constitution, the London Press declared that it was mere talk, a pretext of the kind that the ex-Khedive Ismaïl had made use of against Wilson, and Malet was reported to have declared that it would remain a promise only because the Sultan whom he had seen at Constantinople on his way back to Egypt would never allow it.
The Ottoman Commission added to my distrust of the whole movement and the fact that Arabi had demanded an increase of the army to the number of 18,000 men. These were the common views of the day in England and I had no special knowledge in correction of them. I remember shortly before leaving London, that when I called on my cousin Philip Currie at the Foreign Office, he surprised me by expressing an opinion that perhaps there was something more in the National Movement in Egypt than appeared on the surface. "Malet," he said, "is rather inclined now to believe in it. I wonder you do not go there. Perhaps you might find in Arabi just the man you have been looking for." He knew of course my ideas, which he had never taken quite seriously or as more than a romantic fancy, and his words were lightly spoken and we laughed together without discussion. Yet afterwards I recalled them to memory and wondered that I had been so little responsive. My thoughts, however, were fixed elsewhere.
It is worth recording that the night before I started I entertained at dinner at the Travellers' Club three of my then rather intimate friends, John Morley, who had recently become editor of the "Pall Mall Gazette" besides being editor of the "Fortnightly Review," Sir Alfred Lyall, and our Consul at Jeddah, Zohrab. With these I had a long talk about Mohammedan and Eastern affairs, and it was agreed between me and Morley that, if I found the champion of Arabian reform that I was seeking, I should let him know and he would do his best to put his claims prominently before the English public. Morley was not as yet in Parliament, but he already held a position of high influence with the Government through his personal connection with Chamberlain; his paper, the "Pall Mall," was one of the few Mr. Gladstone read, the only one, I believe, in the soundness of whose views he had any confidence. It was a pleasant dinner and we all took rather enthusiastic views as to the possibilities of the future of Islam. On the subject of Egypt, however, Morley was unfortunately already under other influences than mine. His correspondent for the "Pall Mall Gazette" was no other than the Financial Controller, Sir Auckland Colvin, and so it happened that when the crisis came in the spring he was found, contrary to what might have been expected of him, on the English official and financial side, and one of the strongest advocates of violent measures for the suppression of liberty.
On my way to Egypt an incident occurred which I shall have to return to when its full importance comes to be considered. At Charing Cross Station I found Dilke and his private secretary, Austin Lee, on their way, as I was, to Paris, and I made the whole journey in their company. Dilke that day was in the highest possible spirits. His intimate friend Gambetta had just, 15th November, succeeded St. Hilaire as French Prime Minister; and Dilke, who had been for the last six months the English Commissioner at Paris for the negotiation of a renewal of the Commercial Treaty with France without having succeeded in concluding it, was now returning to his work confident that with the change at the Quai d'Orsay he should no longer have any difficulty. Gambetta, on his side, had a plan of his own in which Dilke as Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office could be of the greatest use to him. St. Hilaire had made a terrible mess of the Tunis invasion and had left all North Africa in a blaze for his successor to deal with. Gambetta had come into office determined to use strong measures, and, as they say, to "grasp the nettle" with both hands. He was filled with apprehension of a general Pan-Islamic rising, and saw in the National movement at Cairo only a new and dangerous manifestation of Moslem "fanaticism." He was closely connected, too, through his Jewish origin with the great financial interests involved in Egypt, and had made up his mind to better St. Hilaire's halting aggression on Tunis by forcing our intervention also in Egypt. In this he wanted our Government to go with him and join in an anti-Islamic crusade in the name of civilization, and as a first measure to strengthen the hold of the European Joint Control at Cairo. On both these matters, the Commercial Treaty and Egypt, Dilke was most communicative, though he did not put all the dots upon the i's, treating the former as a special English interest, the latter as specially a French one. It was a point of party honour with the Liberal Government, which was essentially a Free Trade Government, to show the world that their Free Trade declarations did not prevent them from getting reciprocity from other nations, or favorable commercial terms from protectionist governments, and Dilke knew that it would be a feather in his cap if he could obtain a renewal of the French concessions. So eager indeed was he about it that I distinctly remember saying to myself, half aloud, as we parted at the Gare du Nord: "That man means to sell Egypt for his Commercial Treaty." Nor did the event prove it otherwise than exactly a true prophecy. It will be seen a little later that to the trivial advantage of obtaining certain small reductions of the import duties levied on English goods in France, the whole issue of liberty in Egypt, and to a large extent of Mohammedan reform throughout the world, was sacrificed by our Liberal Government. But of all this in its place.
My going at all to Cairo that winter was, as I have explained, somewhat fortuitous, providential I might almost say, if I was not afraid of giving my personal action in Egypt too much importance and too high a meaning. The ship which was to bring me out my servants and camp equipage, after nearly foundering in the Bay of Biscay, ran aground in the Canal and I was obliged to wait at Suez. I left it for Cairo, meaning to be there for a few days only. It had been reported in England that the Azhar Ulema had been won back from their ideas of reform and had adopted the Sultan's reactionary Pan-Islamic views. Half distrustful of the result, I sent a message to my first friend, at the University, Sheykh Mohammed Khalil, and then another curious accident occurred. In answer to my note begging him to come and see me at the Hôtel du Nil, where I had alighted, behold, instead of the young Alem whom I knew so well, another Azhar Sheykh of the same name, Sheykh Mohammed Khalil el Hajrasi, a perfect stranger who greeted me with a stranger's welcome. The newcomer had received my message, and, thinking it had come from a European merchant with whom he had dealings in connection with his native village in the Sherkieh, had followed close upon the heels of the messenger. This Mohammed el Hajrasi, though a man of less intrinsic worth than my real friend, was a person of some importance at the Azhar, and proved to be perhaps of even more interest to me at the moment than the other could have been from the fact that he was intimate with the chiefs of what was then called the military party at Cairo and was personally acquainted with Arabi. This my own Mohammed Khalil was not, and, as I presently found, neither he nor his chief Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, would have served me as an intermediary with these, for, as already said, they had disapproved of the immixture of the army in political affairs in September and, though rejoicing at the result, were still to a certain extent holding aloof. Hajrasi, however, when he had recovered from his surprise at finding me an Englishman and not the man he had expected, was nothing loath to talk of Arabi and his doings, and when I went on to explain my views to him of reform upon an Arab basis he at once became confidential and explained to me his own views which were not very different from mine. He was one of the principal Sheykhs, he told me, of the Shafeite rite, and had close relations with the Liberal party of reform at Mecca, who were then in avowed opposition to Abdul Hamid and were looking forward to a new Arabian Caliphate. This was a great point of sympathy between us, and it was not long before we had made a full exchange of our ideas; and I think no better proof could be given of the wonderful liberty of thought and speech which marked those days in Egypt than that this eminent religious Sheykh, who certainly a year before would have locked his secrets jealously in his bosom, even perhaps from a friend, should suddenly have thus unloosened his tongue in eloquent response to my questions and should have unfolded to me, a European and a complete stranger, his most dangerous aspirations in politics. It no doubt, however, was in some part due to the presence with me of my learned Arabic professor, Sabunji, whom I had had the happy inspiration to bring with me from London to help out my poor resources of that language.
It was thus from Hajrasi that I first learned the details of what had been going on at Cairo during the summer and the true position of the soldiers in regard to the National Party, facts which I soon after had confirmed to me from a number of other sources including my original friends, Mohammed Khalil and Mohammed Abdu. Sabunji, moreover, who had a real genius for this kind of work, was presently busy all the city over seeking out news for me, so that in a very few days we knew between us pretty nearly everything that was going on. Nor were we long before we had made acquaintance with some of the fellah officers who had taken part with Arabi in the demonstration, especially with Eïd Diab and Ali Fehmi, with whom I was pleasantly impressed. The matters being principally discussed at the moment were, first, the character of the Khedive—was he to be trusted, or was he not, to fulfil the promises he had given? He had promised a Constitution, but was this to be a real transfer of power to Ministers responsible to a Representative Chamber, or only the summoning of a Chamber of Notables with common consultative powers? Tewfik was mistrusted on this point, and it was generally believed that he was being advised to shuffle in this way out of his engagement by Malet who, as already said, had just come from Constantinople and had declared that the Sultan would never agree to real Constitutional government.
The more advanced section of the Nationalists were bitter against the whole house of Mohammed Ali and especially of the branch of it to which Tewfik belonged, his father Ismaïl and his grandfather Ibrahim, a cruel and treacherous race which had brought untold woes upon the fellahin and had ruined the country morally and financially, and had, by their misconduct, brought about foreign intervention. Secondly, there was the question of reforms. Now that the Press was free, attacks were beginning to be made upon various gross abuses, the injustice of the taxation which, under the foreign Financial Control, favoured Europeans at the expense of the native population; of the unnecessary multiplication of highly paid offices held by foreigners, French and English; of the hold obtained by these over the railway administration and the administration of the domains which had passed into the hands of representatives of the Rothschilds; of the scandal of £9,000 a year subvention being granted still, in spite of the poverty of the land, to the European Opera House at Cairo. A campaign was being carried on, especially by the "Taif" newspaper, edited by a hot-headed young man of genius, Abdallah Nadim, against the brothels and wine-shops and disreputable cafés chantants which under protection of the "Capitulations" had invaded Cairo to the grief and anger of pious Moslems. There was an echo, too, of the bitterness felt by all Mohammedans just then on account of the French raid in Tunis where it was affirmed that mosques had been profaned and Moslem women outraged. Nevertheless the feeling at Cairo between native Christian and native Mohammedan was altogether friendly. The Copts were as a rule wholly with the revolution, and their Patriarch was on the best of terms with the Ministry of which Butros Pasha was a prominent and respected member. Even the native Jews with their Chief Rabbi were all for the Constitutional reform. With the officers the point of principal concern was naturally that of the promised increase of the army, which they affirmed was necessary in view of what had taken place in Tunis, where the Bey had been found quite unprepared with a military force sufficient to defend his country. The legal maximum allowed by the Sultan's Firman in Egypt was 18,000 men and the army must be raised to that point.
My earliest intervention in the affairs of the Nationalists of any active kind came about in this way. About the end of November my friend Sheykh Mohammed el Hajrasi informed me of an agitation which was going on among the students of the Azhar, especially those of the Shafeite and Malekite rites, to depose the actual Sheykh el Islam, or as he is more generally called, Sheykh el Jama, the head of the Hanefite rite, Mohammed el Abbasi. The reason given me for this was that, as a nominee of the Khedive, he could not be relied on to give an honest fetwa (legal opinion) as to the legality of constitutional government, and that it was believed that he would be made use of to refuse a fetwa in its favour and so give the Khedive an excuse for withdrawing from his full promise. The Hanefite rite has always been the Court rite in Egypt, the Turkish Viceroys, even since the time of Sultan Selim, having usurped the privilege of Court appointment, and the Government has always named a Hanefite to the supreme religious office. At the same time by far the larger number of the students, who amount in all to some 15,000, have been and are of the other two rites, and an attempt was now to be made in accordance with the revolutionary ideas of the day to revert to the more ancient form of nomination, namely by general election. He had come, el Hajrasi said, to consult me about this because the idea was prevalent that Malet was behind the Khedive in the support he was giving to el Abbasi and in the plan of evading his constitutional promise. The difficulty he thought I might be able to remove, if I went to Malet and used my influence with him in their favour. To this I very readily assented, and with the result that I found Malet entirely ignorant of the whole matter and quite ready to say that the religious disputes of the Ulema were outside his province; and that he should interfere on neither side. On the 5th of December, therefore, el Abbasi was by vote of the students deposed from his office and a Sheykh of the Shafeite rite, el Embabeh, named in his place. El Embabeh had not been the most popular candidate, for the majority of the students had been for the Malekite el Aleysh, a man of high courage and religious authority, who afterwards played a leading part during the war and died in the first months of the English occupation in prison, it is generally believed poisoned from his outspoken evidence at the time of Arabi's trial. Embabeh, a man altogether his inferior, obtained the vote only as the result of a compromise, the Khedive having refused el Aleysh. Four thousand students voted at this election and there were only twenty-five dissentients. The little service thus rendered them gave my friends among the Nationalists confidence in my will and power to serve them, and they asked me to delay my departure and stay on at least some weeks to see them through their farther difficulties. To this I readily agreed, seeing in the development of a movement so congenial to my ideas work of the very kind that I was seeking and one in which I could be of real use, as interpreter of their perfectly legitimate ambitions, both with Malet at the Agency and at home with Gladstone.
In the following few weeks I saw Malet almost daily, and acquired considerable influence over him. Though not unsympathetic towards the Nationalists, I found him very ill informed as to their views and objects. He knew none of their leaders personally except Sherif Pasha, and depended in regard to the general drift of affairs on what Sherif and the Khedive thought fit to tell him. For what was passing in the street he had nobody on whom he could rely except his Greek dragoman Aranghi who picked up his news at the cafés of the European quarter. Thus he had little means of understanding the situation, nor was Sinkiewicz, his new French colleague, much better informed. Malet was also in terrible perplexity as to the real wishes of his own Government. Lord Granville had just written him the well-known despatch of November 4th, in which he had stated in vague terms the sympathy of Her Majesty's Government for reforms in Egypt. But this might mean almost anything, and was no guide as to the attitude he should observe if any new conflict should arise between the Khedive and the Nationalists, or between these united and the Financial Controllers. Above all he was in doubt as to Mr. Gladstone's mind in the affair of the Constitution. It was, therefore, a real relief to him to find in me some one who had a definite policy to suggest, and mine was very clearly that he should support the Nationalists.
I was able, too, to assure him about Gladstone that he need not doubt that when the Prime Minister came to know the facts he must be on the Constitutional side. I received support, too, with Malet on this point from certain English friends of mine whom I found at Cairo, winter visitors, whom I was able to influence to my views. Among these the most prominent were two ex-Members of the House of Commons, Lord Houghton, who in early life had been an enthusiastic advocate of freedom in the East, and Sir William Gregory, an old follower of Gladstone's and a well-known Liberal. By the middle of December I had succeeded in bringing round nearly all the English element at Cairo to my view of the case. Even Sir Auckland Colvin, the English Financial Controller, who had three months before given the Khedive the heroic advice to shoot Arabi, professed himself converted and half inclined to come to terms with the revolution.
[CHAPTER VIII]
GAMBETTA'S POLICY. THE JOINT NOTE
On the 6th of December Arabi, who up to this time had been in retirement at Ras-el-Wady, a military post close to Tel-el-Kebir, arrived at Cairo and on the 12th for the first time I saw him. He had hired a house close to his friend Ali Fehmi's, who was now wholly with him, and not far from the Abdin Barracks. It was in company, if I remember rightly, with Eïd Diab, and taking Sabunji with me, that I went to him, it having been arranged beforehand that I should do so by some of our mutual friends. Arabi was at that time at the height of his popularity, being talked of through the length and breadth of Egypt as "El Wahíd," the "only one," and people were flocking from all sides to Cairo to lay their grievances before him. His outer room was full of suppliants, as was indeed the entrance from the street, and this was every day the case. He had already heard of me as a sympathizer and friend of the fellah cause, and received me with all possible cordiality, especially, he told me, on account of what he had also heard, my family connection with Byron, whom, though he knew nothing of his poetry, he held in high esteem for his work for liberty in Greece. The point is worth noting, as it is very characteristic of Arabi's attitude towards humanity at large without distinction of race or creed. There was nothing in him of the fanatic, if fanaticism means religious hatred, and he was always ready to join hands in the cause of liberty with Jew, Christian, or infidel, notwithstanding his own, by no means lukewarm, piety.
I talked to him long and without reserve on all the questions of the day, and found him equally frank and plain spoken. Towards the Khedive he expressed his perfect loyalty "so long as he kept to his promises and made no attempt to baulk the Egyptians of their promised freedom." But it was clear that he did not wholly trust him, and considered it his duty to keep a strict eye over him lest he should swerve from the path. In a letter that I wrote soon after, 20th December, to Mr. Gladstone, when I had had several other conversations with him, I said of him: "The ideas he expresses are not merely a repetition of the phrases of modern Europe, but are based on a knowledge of history and on the liberal tradition of Arabian thought, inherited from the days when Mohammedanism was liberal. He understands that broader Islam which existed before Mohammed, and the bond of a common worship of the one true God which unites his own faith with that of Judaism and Christianity. He disclaims, I believe, all personal ambition, and there is no kind of doubt that the army and country are devoted to him.... Of his own position he speaks with modesty. 'I am,' he says, 'the representative of the army because circumstances have made the army trust me; but the army itself is but the representative of the people, its guardian till such time as the people shall no longer need it. At present we are the sole national force standing between Egypt and its Turkish rulers, who would renew at any moment, were they permitted, the iniquities of Ismaïl Pasha. The European Control only partially provides against this, and makes no provision whatever by national education in self-government for the day when it shall abandon its financial trust. This we have to see to. We have won for the people their right to speak in an Assembly of Notables, and we keep the ground to prevent their being cajoled or frightened out of it. In this we work not for ourselves but for our children and for those that trust us.... We soldiers are for the moment in the position of those Arabs who answered the Caliph Omar when, in old age, he asked the people whether they were satisfied with his rule, and whether he had walked straightly in the path of justice. "O son of El Khattab," said they, "thou hast indeed walked straightly and we love thee. But thou knewest that we were at hand and ready, if thou hadst walked crookedly, to straighten thee with our swords." I trust that no such violence will be needed. As Egyptians we do not love blood, and hope to shed none; and when our Parliament has learned to speak, our duty will be over. But until such time we are resolved to maintain the rights of the people at any cost and we do not fear, with God's help, to justify our guardianship if need be against all who would silence them.'"
This kind of language, so different from that usually used by Eastern politicians in their conversations with Europeans, impressed me very deeply, and I made a strong mental contrast between Arabi and that other champion of liberty whom I had met and talked with at Damascus, Midhat Pasha, altogether in Arabi's favour. Here was no nonsense about railroads and canals and tramways as nostrums that could redeem the East, but words that went to the root of things and fixed the responsibility of good government on the shoulders which alone could bear it. I felt that even in the incredulous and trifling atmosphere of the House of Commons words like these would be listened to—if only they could be heard there!
With regard to the Sultan and the connection of Egypt with Turkey, Arabi was equally explicit. He had no love, he told me, for the Turks who had mis-governed Egypt for centuries, and he would not hear of interference from Constantinople in the internal affairs of the country. But he made a distinction between the Ottoman Government and the religious authority of the Sultan, whom, as Emir el Mumenin, he was bound, as long as he ruled justly, to obey and honour. Also the example of Tunis, which the French had first detached from the Empire, and then taken possession of, showed how necessary it was to preserve the connection of Egypt with the Head of the Moslem world. "We are all," he said, "children of the Sultan, and live together like a family in one house. But, just as in families, we have, each of us provinces of the Empire, our separate room which is our own to arrange as we will and where even the Sovereign must not wantonly intrude. Egypt has gained this independent position through the Firmans granted, and we will take care that she preserves it. To ask for more than this would be to run a foolish risk, and perhaps lose our liberty altogether."[7] I asked him rather bluntly whether he had been, as was then currently asserted, in personal communication with Constantinople, and I noticed that he was reserved in answering and did so evasively. Doubtless the recollection of his conversation with Ahmed Ratib, of which I then knew nothing, crossed his mind and caused his hesitation, but he did not allude to it.
Finally we talked of the relations of Egypt with the Dual Government of France and England. As to this he admitted the good that had been done by freeing the country of Ismaïl and regularizing the finances, but they must not, he said, stand in the way of the National regeneration by supporting the Khedive's absolute rule or the old Circassian Pashas against them. He looked to England rather than to France for sympathy in their struggle for freedom, and especially to Mr. Gladstone, who had shown himself the friend of liberty everywhere—this in response to what I had explained to him of Gladstone's views—but like everybody else just then at Cairo he distrusted Malet. I did what I could to ease his mind on this point, and so we parted. This first interview gave me so favourable an opinion of the fellah Colonel that I went immediately to my friend, Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, to tell him how he had impressed me, and suggested that a program, in the sense of what Arabi had told me, ought to be drawn up which I might send to Mr. Gladstone, as I felt certain that if he knew the truth as to the National aspirations, in an authoritative way, he could not fail to be impressed by it in a sense favourable to them. I spoke, too, to Malet on the same subject, and he agreed that it might do good, and I consequently, in conjunction with Sheykh Mohammed Abdu and others of the civilian leaders, drew up, Sabunji being our scribe, a manifesto embodying succinctly the views of the National party. This Mohammed Abdu took to Mahmud Pasha Sami, who was once again Minister of War, and gained his adhesion to it, and it was also shown to and approved by Arabi. This done I forwarded it, with Malet's knowledge and approval, to Gladstone, explaining to him the whole situation and inviting his sympathy for a movement so very much in accordance with his avowed principles. "I cannot understand," I said, in concluding my letter to Gladstone, "that these are sentiments to be deplored or actions to be crushed by an English Liberal Government. Both may be easily guided. And I think the lovers of Western progress should rather congratulate themselves on this strange and unlooked for sign of political life in a land which has hitherto been reproached by them as the least thinking portion of the stagnant East. You, sir, I think, once expressed to me your belief that the nations of the East could only regenerate themselves by a spontaneous resumption of their lost national Will, and behold in Egypt that Will has arisen and is now struggling to find words which may persuade Europe of its existence."
While sending this "Program of the National Party" to Gladstone, I also at the same time, by Sir William Gregory's advice, sent it to the "Times." Of this course Malet disapproved as he thought it might complicate matters at Constantinople, an idea strongly fixed in his cautious diplomatic mind. But Gregory insisted that it ought to be published, as otherwise it might be pigeon-holed at Downing Street and overlooked; and I think he was right. Gregory was a personal friend of the then excellent editor of the "Times," Chenery, whose services to the National cause in Egypt at this date were very great. Chenery was a man of a large mind on Eastern affairs, being a considerable Arabic scholar, and had published a most admirable English translation of the "Assemblies of Hariri"; and he was able thus to take a wider view of the Egyptian question than the common journalistic one that it was a question primarily concerning the London Stock Exchange—this although he was himself an Egyptian Bondholder. He consequently gave every prominence to the letters Gregory and I wrote to him during the next few months in support of the National movement, and to the last, even when the war came, continued that favour. In the present instance, indeed, Chenery somewhat overdid his welcome to our program, stating that it had been received from Arabi himself, an inaccuracy which enabled Malet, who knew the facts, to disown it through Reuter's Agency as an authentic document.
It will perhaps be as well to explain here the way in which the London Press and especially Reuter's News Agency was at this time manipulated officially at Cairo and made subservient to the intrigues of diplomacy. Very few London newspapers had any regular correspondent in Egypt, the "Times" and the "Pall Mall Gazette" being, as far as I know, the only two that were thus provided. Both, as far as politics were concerned, were practically in the hands of Sir Auckland Colvin, the English Financial Controller, an astute Indian official, with the traditions of Indian diplomacy strongly developed in his political practice. He had some experience of journalism, having been connected with the "Pioneer" in India, an Anglo-Indian journal of pronounced imperialistic type with which he was still in correspondence. He was also Morley's regular correspondent in the "Pall Mall Gazette," and had through him the ear of the Government. The importance of this unavowed connection will be seen later when he made it his business to bring about English intervention. Lastly, on all important diplomatic matters he inspired the "Times," whose regular correspondent, Scott, depended on him for his information. With regard to Reuter and Havas, the Telegraphic Agencies, both were heavily subventioned by the Anglo-French Financial Control, receiving £1,000 a year each, charged on the thin resources of the Egyptian Budget. Reuter especially was the servant and mouthpiece of the English Agency, and the telegrams despatched to London were under Malet's censorship. This sort of manipulation of the organs of public news in the interests of our diplomacy exists in nearly all the capitals where our agents reside, and is a potent instrument for misleading the home public. The influence is not as a rule exercised by any direct payment, but by favour given in regard to secret and valuable information, and also largely by social amenities. In Egypt it has always within my knowledge been supreme, except at moments of extreme crisis when the body of special Press correspondents at Cairo or Alexandria has been too numerous to be kept under official control. In ordinary times our officials have had complete authority both as to what news should be sent to London, and what news, received from London, should be published in Egypt. It is very necessary that this, the true condition of things, should be steadily borne in mind by historians when they consult the newspaper files of these years in search of information.
Down, however, to near the end of the year 1881, except for this small difference of opinion, my relations with Malet remained perfectly and intimately friendly. He made me the confidant of his doubts and troubles, his anxiety to follow out the exact wishes of the Foreign Office, and his fears lest in so difficult a situation he should do anything which should not gain an official approval. He professed himself, and I think he was, in full sympathy with my view of the National case, and he leaned on me as on one able, at any rate, to act as buffer between him and any new violent trouble while waiting a decision in Downing Street as to clear policy. Thus I find a note that on the 19th December I was asked by him and Sir Auckland Colvin, whose acquaintance I had now made and who affected views hardly less favourable than Malet's to the Nationalists, to help them in a difficulty they were in about the Army Estimates.
It was the time of year when the new Budget was being drafted, and the Nationalist Minister of War, Mahmud Sami, had demanded £600,000 as the amount of the year's estimates for his department. It was an increase of I forget how many thousand pounds over the estimate of 1881, and was necessitated, Mahmud Sami said, by the Khedive's promise of raising the army to the full number of men allowed by the Firman, 18,000. The Minister had explained his insistence on the plea that a refusal would or might cause a new military demonstration, the bug-bear of those days; and I was asked to find out what sum the army would really be satisfied with for their estimates. Colvin authorized me to go as far as £522,000, and to tell Arabi and the officers that it was financially impossible to give more. He had no objection, he said, to the army's being increased so long as the estimates were not exceeded. He thought, however, the sum proposed would suffice for an increase up to 15,000 men. I consequently went to Arabi and argued the matter with him and others of the officers; and persuaded them, on my assurance that Colvin's word could be trusted, to withdraw all further objection. They said they would accept the increased sum of £522,000 as sufficient, and make it go as far in the increase of soldiers as it could. They meant to economize, they said, in other ways, and hoped to get their full complement of men out of the balance. They promised me, too, on this occasion to have patience and make no further armed demonstrations, a promise which to the end they faithfully fulfilled. Arabi's last words to me on this occasion were "men sabber dhaffer," "he who has patience conquers." I sent a note the same day to Colvin informing him of the result, and I was also thanked by Malet for having helped them both out of a considerable difficulty.
Nevertheless Malet, about a week later, surprised me one afternoon, 28th December, when I had been playing lawn tennis with him, as I often did at the Agency, by showing me the draft of a despatch he had just sent to the Foreign Office mentioning my visit to Egypt and the encouragement I had given to the Nationalists, and without mentioning what I had done to help him, complaining only of my having sent the Program against his wishes to the "Times." As we had up to that moment been acting in perfect cordiality together, and nothing whatever had occurred beyond the publication of the manifesto, I took him pretty roundly to task for his ill faith in concealing my other services rendered to his diplomacy, and insisted that he should cancel this misleading despatch, and with such energy that he wrote in my presence a cancelling telegram, and also a second despatch repairing in some measure the injustice he had done me. I have never quite understood what Malet's motive was in this curious manœuvre. I took it at the time to be a passing fit of jealousy, a dislike to the idea that it should be known at the Foreign Office that he owed anything to me in the comparatively good relations he had succeeded in establishing with the Nationalists; but on reflection I have come to the conclusion, as one more in accordance with his cautious character, that he was merely guarding himself officially against public responsibility of any kind being fixed on him for my Nationalist views, should these be condemned in Downing Street. It is the more likely explanation because his private conscience evidently pricked him about it to the extent of avowing to me what he had officially done. The insincerity, however, though repented of, was a warning to me which I did not forget, and while I continued for some weeks more to go to the Agency it was always with a feeling of possible betrayal at Malet's hands. I was ready, nevertheless, to help him, and it was not long before he was again obliged, by the extreme circumstances of his political isolation at Cairo, to resort to my good offices, and, finding himself in flood water altogether beyond his depth, to send me once more as his messenger of peace to Arabi and the other Nationalist leaders.
All had gone well so far, as far as any of us knew, in the political situation at Cairo down to the end of the year, and during the first week of the new year, 1882. There was a good understanding now between all parties in Egypt, the army was quiescent, the Press was moderate under Mohammed Abdu's popular censorship, and the Nationalist Ministers, undisturbed by menace from any quarter, were preparing the draft of the Organic Law which was to give the country its civil liberties. On the 26th of December, the Chamber of Delegates summoned to discuss the articles of the promised Constitution had met at Cairo, and had been opened formally with a reassuring speech by the Khedive in person, whose attitude was so changed for the better towards the popular movement that Malet was able, on the 2nd of January, to write home to Lord Granville: "I found His Highness, for the first time since my return in September, cheerful in mood and taking a hopeful view of the situation. The change was very noticeable. His Highness appears to have frankly accepted the situation." Arabi had ceased to busy himself personally with the redress of grievances, and it had been arranged with the approval of the French and English agents that Arabi should, as they expressed it, "regularize" his position and accept the responsibility of his acknowledged political influence by taking office as Under-Secretary at the War Office. This it had been thought would be putting the dangerous free lance in uniform and securing him to the cause of order.
The only doubtful point was now the attitude of the Deputies in regard to the details of the Constitution they had been assembled to discuss; and the majority of them, as were my reforming friends at the Azhar, seemed disposed to moderation. "We have waited," said Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, "so many hundred years for our freedom that we can well afford now to wait some months." Certainly at that date Malet and Colvin, and I think also Sinkiewicz, were favourably disposed to the claim of the Nationalists to have a true Parliament. They had begun to see that it was the universal national desire, and would act as a safety-valve for ideas more dangerous. A frank public declaration of goodwill at that moment on the part of the English and French Governments towards the popular hopes would have secured a workable arrangement between the Nationalist Government and the Dual Control, which would have safeguarded the bondholders' interests no less than it would have secured to Egypt its liberty. Nor did we think that this would be long delayed.
On the first day of the New Year the National Program I had sent to Mr. Gladstone was published in the "Times," with a leading article and approving comments, and in spite of Malet's prognostication of evil had been well received in Europe, and even at Constantinople where it had drawn down no kind of thunderbolt. Its tone was so studiously moderate, and its reasoning so frank and logical that it seemed impossible the position in Egypt should any longer be misunderstood. Especially in England, with an immense Liberal majority in the House of Commons, and Mr. Gladstone at the head of affairs, it was almost inconceivable that it should not be met in a friendly spirit—quite inconceivable to us who were waiting anxiously for Gladstone's answer at Cairo, that at that very moment the English Foreign Office should be proceeding to acts of menace and the language of armed intervention. Unfortunately, however, though none of us, not even Malet, at the time knew it, the decision, adverse to the Egyptian hopes, had already been half taken. The program reached Mr. Gladstone, as nearly as I can calculate it, a fortnight too late. We were all expecting a message of peace, when, like thunder in a clear sky, the ill-omened Joint Note of January 6th, 1882, was launched upon us. It upset all our hopes and calculations and threw back Egypt once more into a sea of troubles.
It is right that the genesis of this most mischievous document, to which is directly due the whole of the misfortunes during the year, with the loss to Egypt of her liberty, to Mr. Gladstone of his honour, and to France of her secular position of influence on the Nile, should be truly told. Something regarding it may be learned from the published documents, both French and English, but only indirectly, and not all; and I am perhaps the only person not officially concerned in its drafting who am in a position to put all the dots with any precision on the i's. In Egypt it has not unnaturally been supposed that, because in the event it turned to the advantage of English aggression, it was therefore an instrument forged for its own purposes at our Foreign Office, but in reality the reverse is true and the note was drafted not in Downing Street but at the Quai d'Orsay, and in the interests, so far as these were political—for they were also financial—of French ambition.
I have told already how I travelled with Sir Charles Dilke from London to Paris, and of our conversation on the way and of the impression left on me by it that he would "sell Egypt for his Commercial Treaty"; and this is precisely what in fact had happened. The dates as far as I can fix them were these: On the 15th of November St. Hilaire had gone out of office, and had been succeeded by Gambetta, who found himself faced with a general Mohammedan revolt against the French Government in Tunis and Algeria. He was alarmed at the Pan-Islamic character it was taking, and attributed it largely to the Sultan Abdul Hamid's propaganda, and he thought he saw the same influence at work in the National movement in Egypt, as well as the intrigues of Ismaïl, Halim, and others. France had been traditionally hostile to the sovereign claims of the Porte in North Africa, and Gambetta came into office determined to thwart and deal with them by vigorous measures. He was besides, through his Jewish origin, closely connected with the haute finance of the Paris Bourse, and was intimate with the Rothschilds and other capitalists, who had their millions invested in Egyptian Bonds. Nubar Pasha and Rivers Wilson were then both living at Paris, and his close friends and advisers in regard to Egyptian matters, and it was from them that he took his view of the situation.
He had, therefore, not been more than a few days in office before he entered into communication with our Foreign Office, with the object of getting England to join him in vigorous action against the National movement, as a crusade of civilization and a support to the established order at Cairo of Financial things. In London at the same time there was a strong desire to get the Commercial Treaty, which was about to expire, renewed with France as speedily as possible, and advantage was taken at the Foreign Office of Sir Charles Dilke's personal intimacy with the new French Premier to get the negotiation for it finished. A commission for this purpose, of which Dilke and Wilson were the two English members, had been sitting at Paris since the month of May, and so far without result. Dilke's visit to Paris was in connection with both matters, and was resolved on within a week of Gambetta's accession to power. Reference to newspapers of that date, November 1881, will show that the negotiations between the two Governments about the Commercial Treaty were just then in a highly critical state, and it was even reported that they had been broken off. Dilke's presence, however, gave them new life, or at least prevented their demise. Between the 22nd of November and the 15th of December he passed to and fro between the two capitals; and at the latter date we find Gambetta (Blue Book Egypt 5, 1882, page 21) approaching Lord Lyons, our Ambassador at Paris, with a proposal to take common action in Egypt. He considers it to be "extremely important to strengthen the authority of Tewfik Pasha; every endeavour should be made to inspire him with confidence in the support of France and England, and to infuse into him firmness and energy. The adherents of Ismaïl and Halim and the Egyptians generally should be made to understand that France and England would not acquiesce in his being deposed.... It would be advisable to cut short the intrigues of Constantinople," etc. This language is communicated by Lord Lyons to the Foreign Office, and on the 19th Lord Granville "agrees in thinking that the time has come when the two Governments should consider what course had better be adopted," etc. Thus encouraged, Gambetta on the 24th proposes to take occasion of the meeting of the Egyptian Notables to make "a distinct manifestation of union between France and England so as to strengthen the position of Tewfik Pasha and discourage the promoters of disorder." The Egyptian Chamber meets on the 26th, and on the 28th Dilke, who has returned the day before to Paris, has a long conversation with Gambetta about the Treaty of Commerce ("Times"), while on precisely the same day Lord Granville agrees to give "assurance to Tewfik Pasha of the sympathy and support of France and England, and to encourage His Highness to maintain and assert his proper authority."
This identity of date alone suffices to fix the connection between the two negotiations, and shows the precise moment at which the fatal agreement was come to, and that my communication of the National Program to Gladstone, which was posted on the 20th, must have been just too late to prevent the disaster. Letters then took a week to reach London, and Gladstone was away for the Christmas holidays, and cannot have had time, however much he may have been inclined to do so, to forward it on to the Foreign Office. Our Government thus committed to Gambetta's policy, Gambetta on the 31st (Blue Book Egypt 5, 1882) presents to Lyons the draft, drawn up with his own hand, of the Joint Note to be despatched to Cairo in the sense of his previous communication of the 24th—and, be it noted, on the same day negotiations for a renewal of the Commercial Treaty are announced as formally renewed. On the 1st of January the Paris correspondent of the "Times" sends a précis of the Joint Note to London, explaining that he only now forwards it, having been instructed by M. Gambetta only to divulge it "at the proper moment." This is understood to mean the final success of Dilke's commercial mission, and the following day, 2nd January, he returns to London. I trace, nevertheless, the influence of my appeal to Gladstone in the delay of five days, still made by Granville before he unwillingly signs the Note, and the reservation he stipulates for on the part of Her Majesty's Government that "Her Majesty's Government must not be considered as committing themselves thereby to any particular mode of action," a postscript typical of Granville's character, and, as I think too, of a conflict in ideas, afterwards very noticeable, between the Foreign Office, pushed on by Dilke, and Gladstone as Prime Minister.
Such is the evidence which, intelligently read, can be gathered from the published documents of the day. I have, however, a letter from Sir Rivers Wilson dated a few days later, 13th January, in answer to one of mine, which explains in a few words the whole situation. "I am above all pleased," he writes, "at the interest you are taking in Egyptian politics. You confirm what I believe to be the case in two particulars at least, viz., that the soldiers express the feeling of the population, and that Tewfik has been working with the Sultan. As regards the latter circumstance I must say there is nothing surprising in it. Six weeks ago Gambetta said to me, 'Le Khedive est aux genoux du Sultan.' But the reason is plain. Tewfik is weak and cowardly. His army is against him. The Harems hate him. He found no support there where he naturally might have looked for it, viz., at the hands of the English and French Governments, and so he turned to the only quarter where sympathy and perhaps material assistance were forthcoming. It was to remedy this state of things that the idea of the Joint Declaration was conceived, whatever gloss or subsequent explanation may be now put forward, and I shall be disappointed if it does not produce the desired effect and cause the officers, Ulemas, and Notables to understand that renewed disturbance means armed intervention in Europe. Our Government may not like it, but they are bound now by formal engagement to France and cannot withdraw."
This letter, coming from Wilson at Paris, holding the official position there he did, and being, as he was, on intimate terms both with Dilke and Gambetta, is a document of the highest historical importance, and fixes beyond the possibility of doubt on the French Government the initiative in the designed intervention, though the Yellow Books also are not altogether silent. These, though most defective in their information, do not hide Gambetta's initial responsibility. I heard at the time, and I believe that the form of joint intervention he designed for Egypt was that England should demonstrate with a fleet at Alexandria while France should land troops. Had that come to pass we cannot doubt that French influence would now be supreme in Egypt. It was only frustrated that winter by the accident of Gambetta's unlooked-for fall from power by an adverse vote on some domestic matter in the Chamber at the end of the month, for Gladstone at that time was far too averse from violent measures to have sent an English fleet with a French army, and the landing of troops would have been certainly needed.
There is more than one moral to be drawn from this historic episode, and the most instructive is, perhaps, the fact that neither of the two Ministers, with all their cleverness and in spite of their apparent success each in his own scheme, really effected his purpose. Gambetta and Granville in the first weeks of January doubtless plumed themselves on having gained an important object and strengthened the friendly link between their two Governments by a common agreement. Gambetta had got his note, Granville his treaty. But neither rogue was really able to bring home his booty. Gambetta, though he exerted all his influence with the Chamber to get the Commercial Treaty with England renewed, failed to obtain a majority and the treaty lapsed, and with it the Liberal argument that Free Trade was not isolating England. On the other hand, though he had got Granville unwillingly to sign the Note, which he intended to use for the glory of France, Gambetta found that he had forged a weapon which he could not himself wield and which within six months passed into his rival's hand, while the friendly arrangement proved almost as soon as it was come to, to be the destruction of all cordial feeling between the two nations for close on a generation. Personally, in the disappointment of the two intriguers and the rival interest of the two nations, I am able to hold a detached attitude. What seems to me tragic in the matter is that for the sake of their paltry ambitions and paltrier greeds a great national hope was wrecked, and the cause of reform for a great religion postponed for many years. The opportunity of good thrown away by the two statesmen between them can hardly recur again in another half century.
The effect of Gambetta's menace to the National Party was disastrous at Cairo to the cause of peace. I was with Malet soon after the note arrived, and he gave it me to read and asked me what I thought of it. I said: "They will take it as a declaration of war." He answered: "It is not meant in a hostile sense," and explained to me how it might be interpreted in a way favourable to the National hopes. He asked me to go to the Kasr el Nil and persuade Arabi, who had just been made Under-Secretary of War, to accept it thus, authorizing me to say, "that the meaning of the Note as understood by the British Government was that the English Government would not permit any interference of the Sultan with Egypt, and would also not allow the Khedive to go back from his promises or molest the Parliament." He also told me, though he did not authorize me to repeat this on his authority, that he hoped to get leave to add to the Note a written explanation in the sense just given. I know that he telegraphed repeatedly for some such permission, and that he wrote strongly condemning the note as impolitic and dangerous. Not a word, however, of these important protests and requests is to be found in the Blue Books, though the Blue Books show that Lord Granville must have paid attention to them to the extent of expressing himself willing to give some such explanation of the Note but being prevented from doing so by Gambetta. Sinkiewicz seems also to have asked his Government to be allowed to explain the Note, but was forbidden. Sir Auckland Colvin, too, condemned the Note in conversation with me quite as strongly as Malet had done.
I went accordingly to the Kasr el Nil about noon on the 9th (the text of the Note had reached us on the 8th) and found Arabi alone in his official room. For the first and only time I have seen him so, he was angry. His face was like a thundercloud, and there was a peculiar gleam in his eye. He had seen the text of the Note though it had not been published—indeed, it had only as yet been telegraphed—and I asked him how he understood it. "Tell me, rather," he said, "how you understand it." I then delivered my message. He said: "Sir Edward Malet must really think us children who do not know the meaning of words." "In the first place," he said, "it is the language of menace. There is no clerk in this office who would use such words with such a meaning." He alluded to the reference to the Notables made in the first paragraph of the Note. "That," he said, "is a menace to our liberties." Next, the declaration that French and English policy were one meant that, as France had invaded Tunis, so England would invade Egypt. "Let them come," he said, "every man and child in Egypt will fight them. It is contrary to our principles to strike the first blow, but we shall know how to return it." Lastly, as to the guarantee of Tewfik Pasha's throne. "The throne," he said, "if there is one, is the Sultan's. The Khedive needs no foreign guarantees. You may tell me what you will, but I know the meaning of words better than Mr. Malet does." In truth, Malet's explanation was nonsense, and I felt a fool before Arabi and ashamed of having made myself the bearer of such rubbish. But I assured him I had delivered the message as Sir Edward had given it me. "He asks you to believe it," I said, "and I ask you to believe him." At leaving he softened, took me by the arm to lead me down and invited me still to come as before to his house. I said: "I shall only come back when I have better news for you," by which I intended to hint at a possible explanation of the Note such as Malet had telegraphed for permission to give. None however came. Nor did I see Arabi again till more than three weeks later, when a letter from Mr. Gladstone reached me which I interpreted in a more hopeful sense and which caused us great rejoicing.
On returning to the Residency, Malet asked me how I had fared. "They are irreconcilable now," I answered. "The Note has thrown them into the arms of the Sultan." Such indeed was the effect, and not with the soldiers alone, but as soon as the Note was published with all sections of the National Party, even with the Khedive. Gambetta, if he had expected to strengthen Tewfik's hands, had missed his mark entirely. The timid Khedive was only frightened, and the Nationalists, instead of being frightened, were enraged. The Egyptians for the first time found themselves quite united. Sheykh Mohammed Abdu and the cautious Azhar reformers from that point threw in their lot wholly with the advanced party. All, even the Circassians, resented the threat of foreign intervention, and on the other hand the most anti-Turkish of the Nationalists, such as my friend Hajrasi, saw that Arabi had been right in secretly leaning upon the Sultan. Arabi thus gained immensely in popularity and respect, and for many days after this I hardly heard anything from my Egyptian friends but the language of Pan-Islamism. It was a Roustan[8] policy over again, they said.
I did my best to smooth down matters with them till the explanation should arrive which Malet had promised us; but I found my efforts useless. It was an alarming three weeks for us all, from the delivery of the Note till Gambetta's fall. News came that a French force was being assembled for embarkation at Toulon, and that was the form of intervention generally expected. Indeed, I think it is not too much to say that Gambetta's resignation on 31st January alone saved Egypt from the misfortune, even greater perhaps than what afterwards befell her, of a French invasion avowedly anti-Mohammedan and in purely European interests.