"June 1.—Everything seems going on beautifully. Arabi acknowledged master of the situation in Egypt. The Sultan supposed to be so at Constantinople. Button thinks the 'Times' will pay for my telegrams Sabunji may send them. If so, so much the better. I have agreed to give Sabunji £30 a month and his expenses.... Went to the House of Commons with Nigel Kingscote (the Prince of Wales's equerry), who got me into the Speaker's Gallery. Gladstone was giving his announcement of a conference at Constantinople as the upshot of it all. No troops are to be mobilized in India, and no troops to be landed in Egypt. He considers such a course would endanger European lives. McCoan, an M. P., formerly editor of the 'Levant Herald,' asked whether it was true I was 'about to proceed to Egypt to put myself at the head of the insurrection.' Dilke answered that he believed I had 'relinquished my intention.' Gladstone then made the astounding statement that Arabi had 'thrown off the mask,' and had threatened to depose the Khedive and put Halim on the throne of Egypt. This is too absurd, but it is playing into my hands, because the statement must be at once disproved, and the fact of its having been made will show how ignorant the Foreign Office are. Gladstone will now probably be angry with Malet for having led him into such a blunder. Frank Lascelles, however, who walked home with me from the House, tells me he has seen Malet's telegram respecting this, and all it says is that the Khedive told him this, and he does not vouch for its truth. So are things done!"
Malet's telegram, as it stands in the Blue Book (Egypt, No. 11, 1882), says even less than this. It runs thus: "The Khedive sent for M. Sinkiewicz and me this morning and informed us that it had come to his knowledge that the military intended this afternoon to depose him and proclaim Halim Pasha as Khedive of Egypt.... The Khedive said he hardly believed the truth of this information." Yet on such a slender rumour Gladstone, who had declared to me that he never spoke lightly in Parliament and had bidden me wait for his spoken word in the House of Commons as a message of goodwill to the Egyptians, fires off, to give point to his speech, this quite untrue announcement, his first definite utterance since I had seen him on Egypt. It is a curious comment on the ways of Ministers and the processes of the Gladstonian mind. The immediate effect on me of the Prime Minister's speech was a complete and lasting disillusion. Never after this did I place the smallest trust in him, or find reason, even when he came forward as champion of self-government in Ireland and when I gave him my freest support, to look upon him as other than the mere Parliamentarian he in truth was. I do not say that on that wonderful 22nd of March he was not for the moment in earnest when he spoke to me so humanly, but it was clear that his sympathies with the cause of right, however unfeigned, were not the law of his public action, which was dictated, like that of all the rest of them, by motives of expediency. The discovery destroyed for me an illusion about him which I have never regained.
"June 2.—Lord De la Warr, Gregory, Brand, and Button met at my house, and all but Brand seemed highly pleased at the situation. Harry still calls me a traitor, and declares that Arabi has made a gigantic fortune, and that he must and will be suppressed out of Egypt. Button then drew up with Sabunji a code of signals for him to telegraph us news; and I gave him £100 for his expenses, for which he will have to account. The telegrams are to be sent to me and I am to communicate them to Button for the 'Times.' I have given Sabunji my instructions, of which the two most important are that Arabi is to make peace with Tewfik and on no pretence to go to Constantinople. Now we have packed him off, anxious only lest he should be stopped at Alexandria. Button tells me that if I had persisted in going, orders would have been given to Sir Beauchamp Seymour to prevent my landing.... My mind is at rest."
If I had heard Gladstone's speech before agreeing with Hamilton to renounce my journey to Egypt I probably should have persisted in my intention, but, as things turned out, I doubt if it would have resulted in any good. Even if I had not been prevented from landing I could hardly have used more influence personally with Arabi and the other leaders than I succeeded in exercising through Sabunji. Sabunji was an admirable agent in a mission of this kind, and it is impossible I could have been better served. His position as ex-editor of the "Nahleh," a paper which, whether subsidized or not by Ismaïl, had always advocated the most enlightened views of humanitarian progress and Mohammedan reform, gave him a position with the Azhar reformers of considerable influence, and he was, besides, heart and soul with them in the National movement. As my representative he was everywhere received by the Nationalists with open arms, and they gave him their completest confidence. Nor was he unworthy of their trust or mine. The letters I sent him for them he communicated faithfully, and he faithfully reported to me all that they told him. These letters remain a valuable testimony, the only one probably extant, of the inner ideas of the time, and a précis of them will be found at the end of this volume. Sabunji landed at Alexandria on the 7th of June and remained till the day before the bombardment.[15]
FOOTNOTES:
[14] This French spelling of Arabi's name used by the P. M. G. was due originally, I believe, to Colvin's French colleague, de Blignières, and was adopted by him and by Baron Mallortie who, with Colvin, was Morley's principal correspondent that year at Cairo.
[15] Sabunji remained in my employment till the end of 1883. Then he left me and visited India, where he had relations, and after many vicissitudes of fortune drifted to that common haven of Oriental revolutionists, Yildiz Kiosk, where he obtained the confidential post with Sultan Abdul Hamid of translator for the Sultan's private eye of the European Press, a post which I believe he still holds, 1907.
[CHAPTER XIII]
DERVISH'S MISSION
I have now come to a point in the history of this wonderful intrigue where, if I had not semi-official published matter in large measure to support me, I should find it hopeless to convince historians that I was not romancing. It seems so wholly incredible that a Liberal English Government, owning that great and good man Mr. Gladstone as its head, should, for any reason in the world financial, political, or of private necessity, have embarked on a plan so cynically immoral as that which I have now to relate. John Morley in his published life of Gladstone slurs over the whole of his astonishing Egyptian adventure that year in a single short chapter of fifteen pages, out of the fifteen hundred pages of which his panegyric consists, and with reason from his point of view, for he could have hardly told it in any terms of excuse. It is necessary all the same that historians less bound to secrecy should have the details plainly put before them, for no history of the British Occupation will ever be worth the paper it is written on that does not record them.