292 Boutros Pasha Assassinated [ I 9 10 



Paris was liable to stories about him. It was generally attributed either 

 to delirium tremens or adultery. 



" 2.2nd Feb. — Boutros Pasha (the Coptic Prime Minister) has been 

 assassinated at Cairo by one Ibrahim Wardani, a young Nationalist, sec- 

 retary of the Geneva Congress last year. He says he did it to rid Egypt 

 of a minister who was betraying her, as he had already betrayed her 

 on other occasions. It is the first instance of bloodshed by an Egyptian 

 Nationalist. An Egyptian with a letter of recommendation from Arabi 

 lately written, called on me, and when I asked him what he thought of 

 Boutros' death said very simply, ' A good thing. I think it will do 

 good.' Yet he was certainly no fanatic or anything otherwise than a 

 quite harmless sort of professor, wanting to give a lecture on law at 

 the London University. This shows how general anti-English feeling 

 in Egypt has become, and how violent. Rivers Wilson, who asked me 

 to come and see him, had much to tell about Boutros, who had been 

 a friend of his, having helped him on a Commission of Liquidation as 

 long ago as 1879. He had always been an Anglophile, a man of ability 

 but without independence and ready to do what he was told. He was 

 content to be in office and draw his salary, £3,000 a year. This is just 

 what the Nationalists complain of in Boutros. Also they have a special 

 quarrel with him, first, because, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, he had 

 signed the treaty with Cromer which ceded half the sovereignty of the 

 Soudan to England. Secondly, because he connived at the Anglo- 

 French entente about Egypt in 1903 ; thirdly, because, acting as Minister 

 of Justice, he had presided at the Denshawai trial, and lastly, because, 

 as Prime Minister, he had again played into English hands the other 

 day in the matter of the Suez Canal. It was this last betrayal prob- 

 ably that caused his death. 



" 25th Feb. — The Government have escaped from the Tory Amend- 

 ment for Tariff Reform by the skin of their teeth, a majority of thirty- 

 one only, the Irish having abstained from voting, as well as Belloc and 

 half-a-dozen other Radicals. 



"I have sent in my Prison Memorandum to Churchill. (See Ap- 

 pendix.) 



" 26th Feb. — Mary Wentworth arrived this morning from Teneriffe, 

 very ill, poor girl, and I have put her up in Chapel Street. George 

 Wyndham dined with me, and we both chuckled over the wretched 

 plight of the Whigs. Balfour, he tells me, does not wish them to resign 

 and would be glad to keep them on for another year, as pensioners 

 upon Torv good will. I showed him the prison memorandum I have 

 sent to Winston, which he much approves, also two letters I received 

 this morning, one from Hvndman, about the Chinese in Tibet, the 

 other from Malony, about Persia, both most interesting. 



" My old friend, Mine. Arcos, on whom I called to-day, tells me the 



