Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt / Being a Personal Narrative of Events

by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; Ahmad Urabi

I delivered all Arabi's messages about the Slave Trade and the other projects of reform, and then went on to explain Colvin's position and Malet's. He said, almost pathetically, "What can we do? They are esteemed public servants and have received honours for their work in Egypt." He insisted upon the word honours. He then asked me to tell him something about the civilian leaders of the National Party, and I explained the position of some of them, Mohammed Abdu, Ahmed Mahmud, Saadallah Hallabi, Hassan Shereï, and others of the Deputies, and, lastly, Abdallah Nadim, journalist and orator. This designation at once excited Mr. Gladstone, and the account of his eloquence, and he took down his name upon a slip of paper. Thus time slipped away till it was twelve o'clock, and he had another appointment. I had been with him forty minutes—a very fast forty minutes too. As I was going out I turned and asked him, with a sudden thought, whether I might not send Arabi some message from him in answer to his messages. He thought an instant and said, "I think not." And very slowly and deliberately: "But you are at liberty to state your own impression of my sentiments," and then in a sort of House of Commons voice, which was in strange contrast with the extremely personal and human tone in which he had been conversing: "If they wish to judge of these, let them read what we say in Parliament, especially what I say, for I never speak lightly in Parliament. In our public despatches we are much hampered by the opinion of Europe, which we are bound to consider, and this is not favourable to Liberal institutions in Egypt. But they should read our speeches." He had turned to the table, for we were half-way across the room, and took up a paper which was on it, a despatch already signed, and which I felt sure was that which Wilson had told me he had helped to draft, and seemed on the point of showing it to me—and then refrained and put it down again. Once more his manner became natural and intimate. He thanked me again for my letters and all that I had told him, and begged me to let him hear if any new combination arose. His extreme kindness as he shook hands with me moved me greatly and I was near shedding tears, and went away feeling that he was a good as well as a great man, and wondering only how any one with so good a heart could have arrived at being Prime Minister. "El hamdu l'Illah. El hamdu l'Illah," I kept repeating to myself, "El nasr min Alah, wa fathon karibon."

Such was the Gladstone I saw unveiled for a moment that day—a man of infinite private sympathy with good, and of whom one would affirm it impossible he should swerve a hair's breadth from the path of right. But, alas, there was another Gladstone, the opportunist statesman, who was very different from the first, and whom I was presently to see playing in public "such fantastic tricks before high Heaven as make the angels weep." I will attempt a character, drawn from my observation of him, which was a close one, during the next ten years, of this very remarkable personality.

Gladstone, as I have said, was two personages. His human side was very charming. He had an immense power of sympathy, and what I may call a lavish expenditure of enthusiasm for such things as attracted him, and he had also a certain humility of attitude, often towards persons far inferior to himself, which compelled their affectionate regard, as did certain little human weaknesses which have found no place in any memorial of him that has yet been published. All this made him beloved, especially by the young, by the women who knew him well, both those who were good and those who were less good. This was the happy, the consistent part of him. His public life was to large extent a fraud—as indeed the public life of every great Parliamentarian must be. The insincerities of debate were ingrained in him. He had begun them at school and college before he entered the House of Commons, and by the time he was thirty he had learnt to look upon the "Vote of the House" as the supreme criterion of right and wrong in public things. In deference to this he had had constantly to put aside his private predilections of policy, until towards the end of his life his own personal impulses of good had assumed the character of tastes rather than of principles. They were like his taste for music, his taste for china, his taste for bric-à-brac, feelings he would like to indulge, but was restrained from by a higher duty, that of securing a Parliamentary majority. This was his ultimate reason of all action, his true conscience, to which his nobler aspirations had constantly to be sacrificed. His long habit, too, of publicity, had bred in him, as it does in actors, a tendency to self-deception. From constantly acting parts not really his own, he had acquired the power of putting on a character at will, even, I believe, to his inmost thoughts. If he had a new distasteful policy to pursue, his first object was to persuade himself into a belief that it was really congenial to him, and at this he worked until he had made himself his own convert, by the invention of a phrase or an argument which might win his approbation. Thus he was always saved the too close consciousness of his insincerities, for like the tragedian in Dickens, when he had to act Othello, he began by painting himself black all over. I believe this is not an unfair estimate of Gladstone's public character. Certainly it is the light in which his actions showed him to me in his betrayal that year of the Egyptian cause.

As yet, however, I had no misgiving, and in the next few days wrote letters to my friends at Cairo detailing the good news. With Gladstone on our side, what more was there to fear? Only I prayed them to be patient till the Commission I had asked for should arrive. That some attempt was made by Lord Granville to carry out my suggestion is clear from the Blue Books. But Granville's heart was also as clearly not in it, or he was thwarted by Dilke or others in the Foreign Office. He wrote me a note on the 24th asking me to luncheon, when I should have an opportunity of discussing the question of the Commission, but by an accident, which was probably not an accident, the note did not reach me till too late, a manœuvre which was repeated with the same result a week later. The Blue Books record a little abortive negotiation with France for a special inquiry, but it was soon dropped, and Lord Granville's favourite method of dawdling things out is responsible for the rest. Before many weeks had passed, the intriguers at Cairo had effected their purpose of a new disturbance, and the difficulties of conciliation had become enormously increased.

The rest of the short session before Easter in London may be briefly told. I went down for a few days to Crabbet to see after my private affairs, but that did not prevent me from writing to my friends in Egypt, Arabi and Mohammed Abdu and Nadim, telling them of my success with Gladstone and imploring their prudence. On the 26th I received a letter from Button, enclosing a note from a person in a very responsible position, which I find still among my papers. It is so short and instructive that I give it as it stands:

"22nd. I am very anxious that Mr. Wilfrid Blunt should meet and see Natty Rothschild, whose Egyptian interests require no explanation. He goes to Lord Granville and the Foreign Office so constantly, and in this matter, like St. Paul, 'dies daily.' To bring them to an intelligent understanding on this vexed question would be a real service. I am desired to ask if you could bring W. Blunt to luncheon at New Court on Friday next at 1 P.M. Do if you possibly can. It will be useful in many ways."

Here, of course, was the real crux of the situation, the nine millions of the Rothschild loan supposed to be in danger in Egypt, half of which, Button told me, was still held by the Rothschilds themselves. I consequently went up to London on the morning of the 27th, the day named, and under Button's wing to the City, but by misfortune only to find that "Natty" had been called that morning abroad on account of the illness or death of a near relation, I forget which. We consequently did not see him, but he had left a message instead, begging me to write him my views. I regret the accident which prevented the meeting, for it would have been interesting, though I do not suppose it would have effected any good. I have often wondered since what would have been the nature of the "intelligent understanding" so much desired; and I have sometimes suspected that the common financial argument might have been tried with me in the shape of shares to bring about an arrangement with Arabi for the betrayal of his political trust. Some such, it seems, was tried upon Arabi two months later through another channel. Nothing, however, came of the visit, except that I wrote my memorandum, too long a one here to quote, the object of it being to recommend, as a matter of policy, that financiers who had interests in Egypt should accept the revolution that had occurred and make the best of it, and predicted that bondholders would lose more by a war than by conciliation. I have since been told that Rothschild, who, after great tribulation and anguish of mind at the time of the bombardment of Alexandria and nearly in despair thinking he had lost his millions eventually recovered the value of all, resented my prediction of evil as that of a false prophet. But that does not greatly concern me. My memorandum was drawn up not in his interest as creditor but in that of his Egyptian debtors.

Another curious entry, 28th March, gives a hint of the ideas current in Printing House Square. This was the first time I had been to the "Times" office, and Button was again my cicerone. We saw there Macdonald, the manager, with the object of trying to get him to send out a new correspondent to Cairo, who should give the "Times" independent news, and Mackenzie Wallace had been thought of for the purpose. But Macdonald, with Scotch caution, would not go to the expense. He was quite satisfied from a business point of view, he said, with the kind of news Scott, their correspondent at Alexandria, was sending them. English people, he said, had only two interests in Egypt, the Suez Canal and their bonds, if they held any, and Scott's views on these two matters were what they wanted. Beyond this they did not care in any special way about the truth. He complimented me all the same on my own letters, which as I was not paid for them they were obliged to me for, and they would always be glad to print whatever more I had to say. But a special correspondent just then was not needed.

I was in correspondence about this time with Allen, the Secretary of the Anti-Slave-Trade Society, a very worthy man but of extremely narrow views. Sir William Muir had taken me to task in the "Times" for having asserted in one of my letters that it was part of the National program in Egypt to suppress what remained of slavery in Egypt, and he had been at the pains to prove by chapter and verse from the Koran, that slavery was and must always be an institution of a religious character with Mohammedans. Allen, too, I found indignant at the idea of Arabi's being actively in favour of its suppression, which he, Allen, seemed to consider was the sole business of the Society's anti-slavery agents at Cairo. His anger was very much what a master of foxhounds might express at the unauthorized destruction of foxes by a farmer. Mohammedans, he considered, had no business to put down slavery on their own account, or what would become of the Society. This at least was the impression his argument left on me.

Lastly, I find a note of having been asked, 1st April, to meet the Prince of Wales, who wanted to see me, at dinner, en partie carrée. My host on this occasion was Howard Vincent, who was at that time on intimate terms with H. R. H. I was stupid enough not to go to the dinner, which would have been interesting. But I unfortunately had a previous engagement for the same day to meet Princess Louise of Lorne at the Howards, and did not like to break my engagement, which was also an important one. I went, however, in the evening to Vincent's and had some talk with the Prince of Wales about Egypt, though not on the subjects connected with it that most interested me.