1 888] Egyptian Politics II 



Egypt will be permanent. Osman Pasha is a most intelligent good 

 fellow, better worthy of his Khedivial rank than the rest of his race. 

 He narrated to me amongst other things his experience in educating 

 his daughters, which has only resulted in making them unhappy. It 

 was impossible, he said, to find them educated husbands ; nearly every- 

 body now at Constantinople has abandoned the practice of polygamy, 

 only half-a-dozen among the men of rank he knew having more than 

 one wife. He named the Grand Vizier, Kiamil Pasha, as one of the 

 few who continued it ; the Sultan is of course an exception, but he does 

 what no other Sultan has done for generations ; when his women are 

 with child he marries them. Among the common people of the Turks 

 all are monogamists. This may be in part from poverty." 



During my stay that winter in Egypt I was obliged to be very careful 

 how I meddled with politics, even in conversation, for, though Lord 

 Salisbury had given me leave to return there notwithstanding Sir 

 Evelyn Baring's unwillingness, I was under a certain obligation to 

 avoid any kind of publicity in my sympathy with the National cause. 

 I did not therefore remain more than a few days at Cairo on arrival, 

 but went on to my country place at Sheykh Obeyd, ten miles outside 

 the town, where I got the little garden house ready for my wife and 

 daughter to inhabit, a beautiful retired place on the desert edge far 

 from European intrusion, standing on the old pilgrim camel-track where 

 it branches off to Syria, and little frequented except by the Arab horse 

 merchants, who bring their horses for sale each spring to Cairo. There 

 we lived in seclusion and very happily for the three winter months, 

 building and enlarging the house and recovering the garden from the 

 neglected state into which it had fallen through the roguery of those 

 left in charge. These, getting news of my imprisonment in Ireland, 

 had imagined that my career in life was over and that they might 

 treat the garden as their own, economising the cost of its watering and 

 using it as a run for their cattle. It was a labour of love for me 

 restoring its prosperity and arranging for its future better management. 

 It was only little by little that my peasant neighbours came to pay me 

 their polite visits of congratulation, and then I found that there was 

 much hidden sympathy with me among them, repressed only through 

 fear of the government, to which they knew I had been opposed. My 

 journal, however, of that winter contains little in it that is politically 

 worth transcribing. It is a record of conversations with my peasant 

 neighbours and, as they began to hear of my arrival, with the obscurer 

 members of the old National Party, which still looked to the possibility 

 of their old chief Arabi's recall to Egypt, and who came furtively to 

 see me under the guidance of Arabi's old body servant, Mohammed 

 Ahmed, the same who had faithfully preserved and delivered to those 

 who were defending him at his trial his master's political papers and 



