which supported English policy, a corps of volunteers was being enrolled under Menotti Garibaldi to help Arabi. It was only in England that public opinion, worked upon systematically through the Press primed by our diplomacy, was at all excited or called for vigorous action.
The personal element in the struggle is easy to understand. Malet and Colvin had committed themselves at the time of the change of Ministry in February to an attitude of uncompromising hostility to the Nationalists, and any solution of the crisis which should leave these in power at Cairo they knew would mean their own disgrace. Colvin would certainly have had to follow his French colleague, de Blignières, into retirement, and Malet would have been removed to some minor post in the service where his blundering would have been of less grave consequence. The Foreign Office, too, had its own amour propre to save. Dilke was an ambitious man, and did not mean to fail, and even old Granville, fond as he was of his ease, had his public phrases to make good. Thus from the middle of May to the 11th of July, the date of the bombardment, we have the spectacle of a series of diplomatic manœuvres wholly indefensible by any valid plea of necessity, absolutely at variance with all the avowed principles of Mr. Gladstone's Midlothian policy, and so cynically unscrupulous that I doubt if in the annals of our Foreign Office anything comparable to them exists.
On the other hand, in native Egypt, we see the National Party just at the moment when it had secured for the country the right of self-government and an existence of personal and civil freedom which it had never before in all its history enjoyed, when its Parliament had met, and after a first happy session had adjourned, when its mind was busy with projects of reform and when the general desire was to rest and be thankful, at peace with all the world, hurried from its attitude of calm into a sea of apprehension from without, and of treachery, backed by foreign intrigue, from within.