made, of course, many mistakes, and I feel that I am in considerable measure responsible for the determination the Nationalists came to to risk their country's fortune on the die of battle. But I still think their fate would have been a worse one if they had not fought, tamely surrendering to European pressure. They at least thus got a hearing from the world at large, and if any attention since has been paid to fellah grievances it has been won wholly by Arabi's persistence, which I encouraged, in accepting the logic of their political principles even to the point of war. It obliged England to listen to their complaints and, if it could not prevent her from depriving them of their political liberty, it has forced her since to remedy most of their secular material wrongs.
What the future may bring to Egypt I know not. She has grown rich under English tutelage, and though I do not consider riches synonymous with the well being of a nation, they have been in Egypt of at least this value, that they have enabled the native Nile population so far to hold its own against foreign intrusion as owner of the soil. While this is, the Nation will remain alive, and the day may yet come for the fellah race when self-government will be restored to them, and the armed struggle of 1882 will appear to them in its true light as the beginning of their national life, and one, as such, glorious in their annals. To that day of final emancipation I still pin my hopes, though it is not likely I shall live to see it.2
If my life is prolonged for a few years, it is my intention to continue the writing of my memoirs, and this will include much that is of importance to Egypt, though nothing of such high historical value as the recital already made. The present volume may well stand by itself, and so with regret I leave it. I should have wished to include in it an account of Lord Dufferin's mission of reconstruction, and the weak efforts made by Gladstone to undo the wrong he had inflicted on the cause of liberty, and on his own reputation as a man of good. But this would lead me too far, and I prefer to end my actual narrative at the point where we have