attempt from Constantinople at military intervention. Of this Sheykh Mohammed Abdu's letter is ample proof, and it is in harmony with all that Arabi has himself told me. His position, therefore, at the Caliphal Court was a changing and precarious one. He had strong friends there in Ahmed Ratib and Mohammed Zafir, but he also had strong enemies. Sabit Pasha, the Khedive's Turkish secretary, was especially one of them, and reported to Yildiz everything he could find against him. Thus, when the arrest of the Circassian conspirators occurred, among whom were Osman Pasha Rifki, and other important Turks, it is quite possible there was a wave of anger against Arabi in the Sultan's mind. But it does not seem to have lasted, and from the moment when it became once more a question of resisting Europe, Arabi again had the Sultan's approval. As between Tewfik, the puppet of the Anglo-French Control, and Arabi the defender against the two Christian Powers of the independence of a Moslem state, there could be no hesitation in the Caliph's sympathies.
I think it is to be regretted that the Sultan's wish to depose Tewfik and set up Halim was not carried out. Though Arabi did not belong to the party of Halim in Egypt, he would certainly not have opposed it after Tewfik had gone over to the English against him, and it would have been accepted by a considerable number of respectable men in Egypt who knew Halim to be both more intelligent and more liberal in his views than the other. The Sultan's intervention, therefore, would have been a peaceable one if he had refrained from sending an army to enforce it. On the whole it was probably the best solution. The French Government, however, were strongly opposed to the immixture of the Sultan in Egyptian affairs, and our diplomacy at Cairo was pledging itself more and more every day to Tewfik. All that came of the idea of Turkish intervention and of the commission I had asked for, and which had been almost promised, was an absurd compromise of the two things, in the shape of a proposal made, but not insisted on, by Lyons to Freycinet at Paris, that a French, an English, and a Turkish general should be sent to Egypt to "restore discipline in the Egyptian army." Lord Lyons, be it remarked, had a special reason for taking Malet's view of the situation in