1894] Savona the Nationalist Leader 165 



by disappointment. Savona began life as a soldier in the hospital 

 corps, but having learned English he bought his discharge, set up a 

 school and newspaper, and attacked the Government. He was then 

 taken in the Government to keep him quiet, but left it when the Con- 

 stitution of 1887 x was granted, he having opposed it and recorded in 

 a minute his view that Malta should be governed as a Crown Colony 

 of a severe type. This minute was thrown in his teeth when he 

 seceded from the Government and set up as its violent antagonist. 

 Strickland, of course, is officially prejudiced against him, and will not 

 see in him any patriotic motive, but he admits that public opinion 

 generally is anti-English among the educated Maltese, while the coun- 

 try people are indifferent. Savona, he assures me, is losing his popu- 

 larity, but he, Strickland, is tired of the worry and would be glad to 

 change his chief secretaryship for a Colonial appointment. I find him 

 clever and interesting. 



" gth Nov. — Left Malta for Egypt via Brindisi." 



The winter that followed that year and the following spring in 

 Egypt was one that has left me few political records, the new National 

 movement headed the last two years by the Khedive Abbas having lost 

 its first impulse through the reasons I have already described, and I 

 stood aside busying myself with other things, and beyond a single 

 visit to the Khedive at Abdin Palace, my diary contains little worth 

 transcribing. I arrived at Sheykh Obeyd on 15^ Nov. and found 

 Anne and Judith already there, and on the 21st Fenwick Pasha, who 

 for the last two years has been English adviser at the Home Office and 

 head of the police, called on me. He had, compared with most Eng- 

 lishmen, been favourable to native self-government, and under the new 

 regime had become out of favour : 



" Fenwick leaves Egypt immediately to join his regiment in India. 

 He spoke strongly and rather bitterly of the recent change in the ad- 

 ministration which has put the police once more under the Mudirs, 

 and thinks it quite uncompensated by the appointment of Gorst as 

 English Adviser at the Ministry of the Interior. He thinks Cromer 

 may have yielded the point from a Macchiavellian motive of allowing 

 the native Government to make mistakes of which he will profit later, 

 but I do not think this. 



" 29th Nov. — To-day being the Khedive's birthday and a whole 

 holiday, Tigrane Pasha came to see us; he is down on his luck politi- 



1 Malta had been granted a Constitution of very restricted type by the Eng- 

 lish Government in 1887, avowedly as an experiment, with the result that many 

 abuses in the government of the island were remedied ; but a strong movement 

 having been set on foot by the native Maltese for union with the Italian king- 

 dom the Constitution was subsequently withdrawn. 



