interests, and may be read in its most grotesque form of untruth in Lord Dufferin's opening speech to the European Conference at Constantinople. According to the English Ambassador, Egypt—and this was before the bombardment—was in a state of anarchy, where neither life nor property was secure and where massacres were taking place, through the action of the army headed by Arabi and other mutinous colonels, which was making it impossible to carry on the government or secure order and financial stability. How gross an exaggeration this statement of the political case was, and how it had been gradually put together on a basis of lies and inventions, I have already sufficiently shown. What needs still to be explained is the precise share of responsibility for the acceptance of Seymour's challenge to the artillery duel at Alexandria, which commenced the war, assignable to Arabi, on whom the whole of it has been unjustly laid.1
That Arabi had been, from the date of the publication of the Joint Note of 6th January, a chief advocate of self-reliance and preparedness for war is undoubted, but at the same time he had always been for conciliation, if possible, rather than war. Resistance had always been his political platform, but on it he by no means stood alone, and the arrival of the fleets at Alexandria in May had immensely strengthened his position with all sections of civilian opinion. With the example of Tunis before Mohammedan eyes it was indeed impossible not to see what was being prepared for Egypt by the European Powers, the creation of a fictitious condition of anarchy and rebellion which should justify intervention for the protection of the life and property of Europeans, the seizure by persuasion or constraint of the person of the ruler on the plea that he needed protection from his rebellious subjects, and the forced acceptance by him of a military protectorate.