ARABI AND HIS HOUSEHOLD BY LADY GREGORY LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1882 Price Twopence ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ARABI AND HIS HOUSEHOLD. -------------- ‘Report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.’ I wrote these last words of Hamlet on a photograph of Arabi which a friend asked me for at Cairo. But that friend had personal reason for supporting the rule of the English officials in Egypt, and had also doubt as to the possibility of a constitutional government succeeding in a country which could not boast a House of Peers. Other Englishmen have said to me, since I have come home: ‘Arabi is a good man, and his aims are honest. I know it and you know it, but we dare not say it. A lady may say what she likes, but a man is called unpatriotic who ventures to say a word that is good of the man England is determined to crush; it may injure us if we speak as we think.’ But I, like Master Shadow, present no mark to the enemy. I have spoken what I knew to be the truth all through the war, and I wrote down these recollections of Arabi and his family, which I knew must make him appear less of an ogre than he was generally supposed to be some time ago, though not intending them for immediate publication. But now news has reached me from Cairo that Arabi’s wife has had to find a refuge with a high-minded princess, who has always been known as one who loved Egypt, and that that princess is consequently in danger of arrest; that Arabi’s mother is hidden in a poor quarter of the town, afraid to face the vengeance of his enemies now in power; and it is hoping to interest Englishmen in this family—simple, honest, hospitable, as I found them, and who are now poor, hunted, in danger—that I publish them now.