Chapter XI The Circassian Plot

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 Egypt in the fact that Malet had been for years his private secretary and devoted servant in the profession.