It now remains for me to give an account of the chief incidents of the brief campaign in which for two months native Egypt stood up in arms against her English enemy. No true description of it will be found in the works of any English writer, and still less are the French versions of the story true. The reign of terror, which under the protection of the English garrison for a year or more followed the re-establishment of the Khedive and the Turco-Circassian régime at Cairo, effectually stopped the mouths of native Egyptians as to what had happened there during the Khedive's absence, and though a momentary light was shed on the facts by the publicity of Arabi's trial, no organ of the vernacular press was found bold enough to allude to them otherwise than according to the official version; while later, when under French protection the organs of native opinion had gained courage, time had been given for certain legends to grow up which still to a large extent influence the educated Egyptian mind.
The first point to make clear, for it is denaturalized in the Blue Books and has been ignored by all English writers, is the essentially National character of the defence offered by native Egypt to the English invasion. The official version, of course, is that it was the army alone that offered resistance to Seymour's impossible demands at the time of the bombardment, and afterwards to Wolseley's land invasion. This was merely a continuance of the diplomatic fiction which had been built up at the Foreign Office to excuse its determination to intervene in financial interests, and may be read in its most grotesque form of untruth in Lord