regret it because I think it added a personal as well as a political stimulus to his subsequent action. It had become a trial of strength between us.
Two days later, 2nd February, Sherif Pasha, finding he could not bend the National Delegates to his will, and under the influence, I make little doubt, of Colvin's threat of intervention, resigned office, and was succeeded, at the choice of the Delegates, by Mahmud Pasha Sami as Prime Minister, with Arabi as Minister of War, a thoroughgoing Nationalist combination at which all Egypt rejoiced.1
I heard the news at my retreat in the desert with mixed feelings of jubilation and anxiety, an anxiety which was only relieved when on the 27th I received an answer from Mr. Gladstone to my letter of six weeks before enclosing to him the National program. The long delay in replying was doubtless due to the embarrassment and perplexity as to a policy which Lord Granville's deal with Gambetta had involved him in. Gambetta's providential fall, however, had now to a large extent freed our Government's hands, and a passage was being inserted in the Queen's speech at the opening of Parliament which conveyed something like an expression of sympathy with the National Egyptian hopes.
This, Mr. Gladstone sent me later, and his letter concluded with the following reassuring words: "I feel quite sure," he said, "that unless there be a sad failure of good sense on one or both, or as I should say, on all sides, we shall be able to bring this question to a favourable issue. My own opinions about Egypt were set forth in the 'Nineteenth Century' a short time before we took office, and I am not aware as yet of having seen any reason to change them."2
The reference thus made to his article "Aggression on Egypt," was of the very highest importance, for, as already mentioned, the article was a scathing denunciation of just that forward policy of intervention and annexation which Colvin had propounded to me.