Arabi’s frame embodied the fine animal qualities of the better class of fellahin, but to these he added mental gifts of no mean order.  After imbibing the rather narrow education of a devout Moslem, he formed some acquaintance with western thought, and from it his facile mind selected a stock of ideas which found ready expression in conversation.  His soft dreamy eyes and fluent speech rarely failed to captivate men of all classes[360].  His popularity endowed the discontented camarilla with new vigour, enabling it to focus all the discontented elements, and to become a movement of almost national import.  Yet Arabi was its spokesman, or figure-head, rather than the actual propelling power.  He seems to have been to a large extent the dupe of schemers who pushed him on for their own advantage.  At any rate it is significant that after his fall he declared that British supremacy was the one thing needful for Egypt; and during his old age, passed in Ceylon, he often made similar statements[361].

[Footnote 360:  Sir D.M.  Wallace, Egypt and the Egyptian Question, p. 67.]

[Footnote 361:  Mr. Morley says (Life of Gladstone, vol. iii. p. 73) that Arabi’s movement “was in truth national as well as military; it was anti-European, and above all, it was in its objects anti-Turk.”—­In view of the evidence collected by Sir D.M.  Wallace, and by Lord Milner (England in Egypt), I venture to question these statements.  The movement clearly was military and anti-Turk in its beginning.  Later on it sought support in the people, and became anti-European and to some extent national; but to that extent it ceased to be anti-Turk.  Besides, why should the Sultan have encouraged it?  How far it genuinely relied on the populace must for the present remain in doubt; but the evidence collected by Mr. Broadley, How We Defended Arabi (1884), seems to show that Arabi and his supporters were inspired by thoroughly patriotic and enlightened motives.]

The Khedive’s Ministers, hearing of the intrigues of the discontented officers, resolved to arrest their chiefs; but on the secret leaking out, the offenders turned the tables on the authorities, and with soldiers at their back demanded the dismissal of the Minister of War and the redress of their chief grievance—­the undue promotion of Turks and Circassians.

The Khedive felt constrained to yield, and agreed to the appointment of a Minister of War who was a secret friend of the plotters.  They next ventured on a military demonstration in front of the Khedive’s palace, with a view to extorting the dismissal of the able and energetic Prime Minister, Riaz Pasha.  Again Tewfik yielded, and consented to the appointment of the weak and indolent Sherif Pasha.  To consolidate their triumph the mutineers now proposed measures which would please the populace.  Chief among them was a plan for instituting a consultative National Assembly.  This would serve as a check on the Dual Control and on the young Khedive, whom it had placed in his present ambiguous position.