popular voice to reinstate him as Minister of War, with even larger responsibilities than before, and in even more conspicuous honour. Our Foreign Office, therefore, found itself in the position of having either to eat its empty words in a very public manner, or to make them good against one who was now very generally recognized in Europe as a National hero. Its colleague in the matter, France, had long shown a desire to be out of the sordid adventure, and Mr. Gladstone's Government was left practically to act alone, if it insisted on going on, according to its own methods. The method resolved on was certainly one of the most extraordinary ever used by a civilized government in modern times, and the very last which could have been expected of one owning Mr. Gladstone as its chief. It was to beg assistance from the Sultan and persuade him to intervene to "get rid of Arabi," not by a mere exercise of his sovereign command nor yet by openly bringing in against him those Ottoman gens d'armes which had been talked of, but by one of those old-fashioned Turkish acts of treachery which were traditional with the Porte in its dealings with its Christian and other subjects in too successful rebellion against it.
A first hint of some such possible plan may be found in the "Pall Mall Gazette," in one of its little inspired articles, as far back as the 15th May, in which John Morley, explaining with satisfaction the Government policy of "bottle holding" the Khedive, adds that "Ourabi may before long be quietly got rid of." The full plan is of course not divulged in the Blue Books, but it is naïvely disclosed a little later in the "Pall Mall," where, without the slightest apparent sense of its impropriety, the dots are put plainly on the i's. The idea as I learned it at the time was that the Sultan should send a military Commissioner to Egypt, a soldier of the old energetic unscrupulous type, who, by the mere terror of his presence, should