191 1 ] Our Paper "Egypt' Issued 337 



" 1st Feb. — We launched the manifesto about our paper ' Egypt ' 

 this morning, with my sole name on it as provisional Chairman, none 

 of my fellow Committeemen being willing to attach their signatures. 

 English Radicals are timorous folk. Parliament met yesterday. The 

 principal incident was a protest made by one Ginnell, an Independent 

 Irish Nationalist, against the system of excluding private members 

 from all opportunity of speech. 



" $th Feb. (Sunday). — Two young Egyptians, came from Oxford 

 to see me. They described the regime of political terror at Cairo as 

 closely resembling what I remember there in 1883, the city honey- 

 combed with spies, and subject to arrests and imprisonments under the 

 new Press Law. They told me also that two months ago the German 

 Consul General at Cairo, Prince Hatzfeldt, issued an invitation to 

 young Egyptians to go for their education to Berlin. This was pub- 

 lished in the ' Mowayyad.' 



" Later Dillon looked in. I urged him to bring forward the subject 

 of Egypt in the Debate on the Address to-morrow, but he tells me 

 Redmond would not support any attack on Grey just now, nor will 

 the Irish Party move any amendment. The Labour members cannot 

 be relied on. They are choosing Ramsay Macdonald as their leader. 

 Talking about Ireland he said the King's visit was most unfortunate ; 

 he would be badly received in Dublin, but the King had insisted upon 

 going there. Ginnell he described as a clever but quite wild man, who 

 would not conform to the rules of the House of Commons. They had 

 had to carry him out of the House on one occasion by the arms and 

 legs. At one time he had been his, Dillon's, private secretary. Of 

 Birrell he has a high opinion. 



" Meynell tells me the Pope has forbidden mixed marriages in 

 Ireland unless solemnized by Catholic rite, and has made the rule 

 retrospective. This will raise trouble, and is contrary to all the form- 

 erly received canon law, where the declared consent of the parties fol- 

 lowed by consummation was considered to constitute a binding mar- 

 riage even without any religious ceremony. 



" 6th Feb. — I have been arranging Lytton's letters to me, some two 

 hundred of them, a really wonderful series, from 1865 to 1891, when 

 he died. They are as good as Byron's or Shelley's, and far better than 

 Trelawney's, whose letters to Clare and Mary Shelley I have just 

 been reading. These last are disappointing, being for the most part 

 very badly written ; the older ones school-boyish, the later less vigorous 

 than one would have expected from the old buccaneer Trelawney posed 

 as being. Both these women seem to have played with him ; Mary 

 certainly did, and it does not appear from the letters that with Clare 

 there was anything more than a single brief passionate episode, never 

 quite realized. 



