138 Cromer TriumpJiant [1894 



summer. There are also some of the large spotted cuckoos in the 

 garden just now. 



" 20th April. — Our last day at Sheykh Obeyd. I am grieved to 

 leave it this year more than any year before, and have half made up 

 my mind that this shall be my last visit to England. My true home is 

 more and more in Egypt." 



We left the following day, and here I close this chapter. With it 

 ends the episode as far as I was personally concerned in it of the 

 National movement of 1892-1894. It failed through the absence of 

 any strong leader to take direction of it; through the youth and inex- 

 perience of the Khedive Abbas ; through the unscrupulous determina- 

 tion of Lord Cromer acting in what he considered English Imperial 

 interests, and through the still more unscrupulous money interests 

 worked through Lord Rosebery from London and Paris. Lord Rose- 

 bery's family connection with the Rothschilds is a sufficient explanation 

 of this last influence. French diplomacy at Cairo seems to me to have 

 been very weakly managed by M. de Reverseaux, the French Consul 

 General there, though how much of the vacillation between encourage- 

 ment given to the Nationalists when they made a forward move, and 

 their abandonment when the advance had been made, was due to the 

 French Representative at Cairo or to the Ministers at the Quai d'Orsay, 

 I cannot determine. Be it as it may, the spring of 1894 saw the move- 

 ment lose its force, and brought to a complete standstill a year later by 

 the retirement in his turn of Nubar Pasha, and Lord Cromer's installa- 

 tion as absolute despot ruling Egypt through a dummy Minister, 

 Mustafa Pasha Fehmi, while the Khedive Abbas, cut off from all 

 legitimate exercise of his viceregal rights, consoled himself with the 

 follies of youth, money speculations, and impotent intrigue. 



It was the history repeated a hundred times over of the English 

 manipulation of the native States of India. To me it was a mournful 

 spectacle, a blank period during which, though still maintaining a deep 

 interest in what went on, I held a position entirely of spectator, keeping 

 touch with the local politics of the day during my winter visit to Sheykh 

 Obeyd mainly through Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, whom I established 

 on a corner of my property in a country house within half a mile of 

 my own. He had an advantage for me as historian and diarist of 

 being personally intimate with Mustafa Fehmi who concealed nothing 

 from him, while Abdu concealed nothing from me. It was as an 

 historian only that I followed the development of the Cromerian regime, 

 until in 1906 Cromer's astonishing blunders of that year once more gave 

 life to Egyptian Nationalism, and it found a voice in Mustafa Kamel. 

 My diary in the meagreness of its political entries corresponds with my 

 political abstention during this weary interval. Nevertheless there 



