THE EVACUATION OF THE SOUDAN. 343 certain, would remove any chance of Turkish intervention. On this proposal being dropped, the Egyptian Government was curtly informed that England saw no reason to change her advice in respect of the Soudan ; that, so long as her provisional occupation endured, her advice must be followed ; and that any native Ministers or officials who declined to act in accordance with this advice must be dismissed from their posts.

If I am rightly informed, the tenor of this despatch was suggested to the Foreign Office by our Consul-General, who had from the outset realized the fallacy of the view entertained in Downing Street, that the Egyptian and the Soudan questions were issues which could be treated separately, and who had contended that so long as England directed the general policy of Egypt, she must also of necessity dictate the policy of Egypt in regard to the Soudan. It is characteristic of the persistency with which Mr. Gladstone clung to the delufeion that our occupation was only to be temporary, that in the Foreign Office despatch, which placed before the Egyptian Ministry the alternative of either decreeing the permanent evacuation of the Soudan or of resigning office, care should have been taken to maintain the theory that the occupation was only provisional. Just about this period, while passing through Paris on my way to Egypt, I had a conversation with Baron de Soubeyran, then one of the leading Franco-Egyptian financiers, who asked me what people in England thought of the occupation. I told him