I 9°9] The Counter Revolution at Constantinople 243 



Queen refused to appoint him because in one of his poems he had 

 fulminated against the Emperor of Russia, and she said that after 

 that it was impossible he could be in her household service. The last 

 thirty years of his life have been stultified in a suburban villa at 

 Putney with Watts-Dunton, who had used him as an advertisement 

 for his own literary trash. 



" Last night Belloc looked in on me very woebegone because he had 

 made a rash vow of total abstinence from liquor during the whole of 

 Holy Week, and it was the last day of his sufferings, which he said 

 were beyond endurance. ' It has its uses, however,' he said, ' if only 

 to make one realize how flat the brain becomes when cut off from wine. 

 There are moments when I find myself thinking and arguing almost 

 like a teetotaler, but I will make it up to-morrow after Mass as soon 

 as ever I have received Communion.' I tried to make him break his 

 vow, but in vain, and he went home sadly. [N.B. He wrote the most 

 amusing of all his books, ' A change in the Cabinet,' during that temper- 

 ate week.] 



" 13th April. — From Blanche Hozier I get a letter, one of the 

 best she ever wrote. In it she describes her doings at Dieppe, where 

 she has established herself in a home of her own. It also encloses a 

 pretty scrap from Clementine at Blenheim, where she is very happy 

 with Winston. Blanche has a real genius for letter writing, women 

 being far better letter writers than men, they chatter more naturally 

 and are less self-conscious. I am reading ' Pepys's Diary,' the un- 

 bowdlerized edition, which is extraordinarily good and has something 

 of both these qualities, but is without grace and is coarsely fibred. 



" 14th April. — There has been a counter revolution at Constanti- 

 nople, and Abdul Hamid has once more got the upper hand. A mutiny 

 of soldiers against their Young Turk officers, joined in by the less 

 liberal Ulema and a reactionary mob, has upset the Committee of Union 

 and Progress, and has forced Hilmi Pasha, the Vizier, and the Ministry 

 to resign. Constantinople is in full reaction. 



" 18th April. — The Young Turks are marching, it is said, on Salonika 

 from Constantinople. 



" igth April. — Frederick Ryan, late Editor of the ' Egyptian Stand- 

 ard,' has returned from Cairo, and came to-day with the latest news. 

 He is an intelligent young man of the same Irish type as Malony, good, 

 modest, and sincere. He tells me there is a complete split now between 

 the Khedive and Farid Bey, and the Press Law is directed mainly 

 against the Khedive's opponents. Abbas has lost what little popularity 

 he had with the old-fashioned Ulema by his attempt to misappropri- 

 ate the Awkaf revenues of the Azhar. The students struck for an 

 increase of their bread money needed by the immense rise of prices. 

 All the Cairo newspapers protested against the Press Law except two 



