questions I told him all my thoughts very frankly, and I remember especially suggesting to him the possible independence some day of Syria, and that it might join hands with Egypt against the common misgovernment of their Turkish rulers. To this, however, he by no means responded, saying that there could be no political connection between the two provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and that the case of each stood on a separate basis. He was more influenced by me, however, when I spoke unfavourably of the then much talked of Euphrates Valley Railway scheme, under English guarantee, in which I saw a new danger to Arabian liberty, and I have reason to know that my arguments weighed with him to the extent that he shortly after refused all Foreign Office support to the enterprise, which has remained to this day abandoned. My conversation on this occasion left me with a high opinion of Lord Salisbury's intelligence on Eastern matters, and, though his view of them has never been mine, I have always preserved a strong feeling of his personal integrity, while it began a connection between us never intimate, but always friendly on his part. To the last he allowed me to write to him on these subjects, and though seldom agreeing he invariably responded to my occasional letters with more than the usual official courtesy.
Any hopes, however, that I may have had of persuading Lord Salisbury to my views about the Arabs were speedily dispelled by his attitude that summer at Berlin, when his policy was publicly proclaimed of guaranteeing to the Sultan the whole of his Asiatic dominions. The inner history of the Congress of Berlin as it affected Egypt is so curious, and at the same time so important, that it is necessary I should tell it here as I learned it soon after the events had happened.
It will be remembered that the terrible winter of 1877-8 witnessed the final scenes of the war between Russia and Turkey, and that the spring of the new year found the Czar's army at the gates of Constantinople. The same period had been one of extreme misery in Egypt. The Cave mission,