CHAPTER X MY PLEADING IN DOWNING STREET

On 20th March I lunched at Button's to meet his uncle, Robert Bourke, who was to bring forward the Egyptian question next week formally in Parliament. With him was another Tory member, Montague Guest, who had interested himself in the cause of Tunis. These were among the second strings to my bow, if Gladstone should fail me. Then I attended a meeting of the Asiatic Society, to which I had just been elected, and in the evening dined with Rivers Wilson. With Wilson I "quarrelled fearfully about Egypt." He told me he had helped to draw up a new Note, at the Foreign Office, which was now being despatched to Malet, "insisting on the fulfilment of all International engagements," a Note intended to be a new menace to the National Party, but which I think was never sent, or perhaps cancelled, as it does not appear in the Blue Book. My letter to Granville may have been the cause of its suppression. Wilson insisted that the whole National movement was an invention of Ismaïl's, and that "if the ex-Khedive were to land to-morrow at Alexandria, every Egyptian would come to him on his hands and knees." From this dinner I went on to a party at Lady Kenmare's, where I met Lady Salisbury, who took me aside, and cross-questioned me with much appearance of sympathy about the Egyptian cause, and I laid it before her to the best of my ability, knowing that what I said would be repeated to her husband. Of course there could be no real sympathy in any of the Tories, especially in Lord Salisbury, for my views on Egyptian liberty, but it suited the Opposition to take me up to just the extent that would help them to bring the Government into discredit, Salisbury himself was throughout a thoroughgoing advocate of intervention. I walked home that evening with Hamilton, whom I had found at the party, and told him of Wilson's boast about the new Note, and entreated him to get me