While these great events were happening on the Nile, I at my home at Crabbet spent the summer sadly enough. My sympathies were, of course, still all with the Egyptians, but I was cut off from every means of communication with them, and the war fever was running too strongly during the first weeks of the fighting for further words of mine to be of any avail. Publicly I held my peace. All that I could do was to prepare an "Apologia" of the National movement and of my own connection with it—for this was now being virulently attacked in the press1—and wait the issue of the campaign.
Nevertheless, though in dire disgrace with the Government, I did not wholly lose touch with Downing Street. I saw Hamilton once or twice, and submitted proofs of my "Apologia" to him and Mr. Gladstone before it was published, and this was counted to me by them for righteousness. It appeared in the September number of "The Nineteenth Century Review," and at a favourable moment when the first sparkle of military glory had faded, and reasonable people were beginning to ask themselves what after all we were fighting in Egypt about. Written from the heart even more than from the head, my pleading had a success far beyond expectation and, taken in connection with an anti-war tour embarked on in the provinces by Sir Wilfrid Lawson, Mr. Seymour Keay and a few other genuine Radicals, touched at last what was called the "Nonconformist" conscience of the country and turned the tide of opinion distinctly in my favour. This encouraged me. About the same time, too, a letter reached me from General Gordon, dated "Cape Town, the 3rd of August," in which he avowed his sympathy with the cause I had been advocating, and which elated me not a little. It was as follows: