seriously hurt, and the Italian and Greek Consuls received minor injuries, the disturbance being only quelled by the arrival of the regular troops. It was the first act of popular violence which, during the whole history of the year's revolution in Egypt, had been committed, and the news of it, spread throughout Europe by telegraph, produced, especially in England, a great sensation.
As the responsibility for this affair, so unfortunate for the National cause in Egypt, was afterwards laid upon the person it had most injured, Arabi, and as the incident was made use of by our Foreign Office and Admiralty, with other excuses not less unjust, to bring about the bombardment of Alexandria and the war that followed, the plea being that Egypt was in a "proved state of anarchy," it will be well here, before we go any further, to place upon the right shoulders what criminality there was in the whole incident. When I heard of it in London my first instinct was that, if not the accident the papers said it was, it was part of the plot I knew to have been designed through Dervish Pasha at the Foreign Office to entrap and betray Arabi, but it was not till after the war that I came into possession of the full particulars concerning it, or had it in my power to refute the false accusations made a little later against the Nationalists of having themselves devised and brought it about. The very contrary to this was then shown to be truth. As we now all know, who are in the secrets of that time, the riot, though perhaps accidental in its immediate origin, had for some weeks previously been in the designs of the Court party as a means at the proper moment to discredit Arabi as one capable of preserving order in the country.
The position of things at Alexandria was this: Alexandria, more than any other town in Egypt, was in large part a European city, inhabited, besides the Moslem population, by Greek, Italian and Maltese colonists, all engaged in trade and many of them money-lenders. At no time had there been much love between the two classes and the arrival of the fleets, avowedly with the intention of protecting European interests, greatly increased the ill-feeling. It needed much loyalty, firmness, and tact on the