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