bombardment of Alexandria and the war that followed, the plea being that Egypt was in a "proved state of anarchy," it will be well here, before we go any further, to place upon the right shoulders what criminality there was in the whole incident. When I heard of it in London my first instinct was that, if not the accident the papers said it was, it was part of the plot I knew to have been designed through Dervish Pasha at the Foreign Office to entrap and betray Arabi, but it was not till after the war that I came into possession of the full particulars concerning it, or had it in my power to refute the false accusations made a little later against the Nationalists of having themselves devised and brought it about. The very contrary to this was then shown to be truth. As we now all know, who are in the secrets of that time, the riot, though perhaps accidental in its immediate origin, had for some weeks previously been in the designs of the Court party as a means at the proper moment to discredit Arabi as one capable of preserving order in the country.
The position of things at Alexandria was this: Alexandria, more than any other town in Egypt, was in large part a European city, inhabited, besides the Moslem population, by Greek, Italian and Maltese colonists, all engaged in trade and many of them money-lenders. At no time had there been much love between the two classes and the arrival of the fleets, avowedly with the intention of protecting European interests, greatly increased the ill-feeling. It needed much loyalty, firmness, and tact on the part of the Governor of the town to preserve order, and great discretion on the part of the fleet. Unfortunately the Governor, Omar Pasha Lutfi, was a man entirely opposed to the Nationalist Ministry. He was a Circassian, a member of the Court party, and a partisan of the ex-Khedive Ismaïl's, and at the time of the Circassian plot had done service to Tewfik by entering into