and my heart is with the Arabs. I care less about opening up the trade
with the Soudan and all the new railways, and I should like to see person
and property safe, which no one's is here (Europeans, of course,
excepted). Ismail Pasha got the Sultan to allow him to take 90,000
feddans of uncultivated land for himself as private property, very well,
but the late Viceroy Said granted eight years ago certain uncultivated
lands to a good many Turks, his _employes_, in hopes of founding a landed
aristocracy and inducing them to spend their capital in cultivation. They
did so, and now Ismail Pasha takes their improved land and gives them
feddan for feddan of his new land, which will take five years to bring
into cultivation, instead. He forces them to sign a _voluntary_ deed of
exchange, or they go off to Fazogloo, a hot Siberia whence none return.
The Sultan also left a large sum of money for religious institutions and
charities--Muslim, Jew, and Christian. None have received a foddah. It
is true the Sultan and his suite plundered the Pasha and the people here;
but from all I hear the Sultan really wishes to do good. What is wanted
here is hands to till the ground, and wages are very high; food, of
course, gets dearer, and the forced labour inflicts more suffering than
before, and the population will decrease yet faster. This appears to me
to be a state of things in which it is no use to say that public works
must be made at any cost. The wealth will perhaps be increased, if
meanwhile the people are not exterminated. Then, every new Pasha builds
a huge new palace while those of his predecessors fall to ruin. Mehemet
Ali's sons even cut down the trees of his beautiful botanical garden and
planted beans there; so money is constantly wasted more than if it were
thrown into the Nile, for then the Fellaheen would not have to spend
their time, so much wanted for agriculture, in building hideous barrack-
like so-called palaces. What chokes me is to hear English people talk of
the stick being 'the only way to manage Arabs' as if anyone could doubt
that it is the easiest way to manage any people where it can be used with