From Blackwood's Magazine. TROUBLED EGYPT, AND THE LATE KHEDIVE. ence, he has finally lost his liberty, and is doomed now to drag on until the end the chains of gilded captivity in his splendid prison-palace of Emirghian on the Bosphorus shore. THERE is a tendency in this country among educated and liberal-minded people - among people even who have followed To me it has always argued a grave the course of events in the world of politics deterioration of that keen, bright intellect during the past twenty years with close that Ismail so unquestionably possessed, attention and an interest beyond the aver- that he should have permitted himself to age to heap upon the shoulders of one be tempted into a visit to Constantinople. man the primary blame for all that long| He cannot have concealed from himself 'ist of crushing misfortunes in Egypt its dangers. He would never in his which began with the ruinous concession younger days have essayed to confront for the Suez Canal and culminated in the them. Yet he went, not blindfold; he death of Gordon at Khartoum. The men- had before his eyes examples of what he tion of this man's name in conversation must expect. There were already in and calls forth the stilted smile that greets an around Stamboul several bright birds of equivocal allusion, coupled with a head-gaudy plumage, from Tunis, from Baghshake of reprobation of his manifold wick- dad, and elsewhere — though none so rare edness. Stories of his loose, dissolute as he breaking their beaks against the life, his spoilt-child caprices, his wanton gold bars of their cages, but knowing that extravagances, and his reckless, unthink- their struggles were vain. Yet, despite all ing expenditure, are in all our memories this, he ventured into the snare, and side by side with dark tales of his cruel- Europe will know him no more. ties to a people already crushed to the earth beneath their burden; of extortions from a patient, starving peasantry, by the teeth of the scourge, of the means to gratify his unbridled passions; of treacheries to trusted friends, of unscrupulous use of hideous secret means for removing a foe whom he feared or making a place for a parasite whom he favored. To many minds, indeed, the worst types of Oriental tyranny and license engrafted with the ex-tration of his country in a condition of otic refinements of Western depravity are embodied in the person of Ismail Pasha. It is no part of my present purpose to parade as the apologist of the ex-khedive. With the blame cast upon him, though much of it is unjust, I have nothing to do. It is my intention, indeed, to refer to him only in so far as his acts cannot be disassociated from their consequences to his son. For himself, whatever be his faults, his vices, his criminality even, he has surely paid the penalty amply and in full. Shorn of all save the merest semblance of state, reft of all power, hurled from place, and robbed of fortune, of honors, of the opportunity for intrigue, and of that yet more precious possession, the joy of detecting and combating intrigue in others, which was the very essence of his exist The reign of Ismail can be summed up in two well-known sentences: "Great expectations," "large deductions." It was essentially a reign of action. It teemed with mighty projects which were carried, many of them, to most successful issue, and if this result was invariably attained at stupendous, at crushing cost, the fault lay not entirely with the ex-khedive. On Ismail's accession, he found the adminis chaotic decay. Nothing remained but the ruins of his grandfather's great work, and everything had to be begun afresh, and new life infused into the languishing undertakings of the founder of the dynasty. His father Ibrahim, Mehemet Ali's warrior son, one of the most attractive figures of his time, brave, upright, just the sword-hand of the mighty man of Cavalla, the victor of Konieh, the vanquisher of Khosrew, who had swept like a flame through Syria and Arabia - had died leaving no trace upon the institutions of his country. His military genius was his title to fame, and the record of his battles was the record of his life. Yet he had proved himself in Syria so able an administrator that, had his life been prolonged, much of the history of Egypt might have From Blackwood's Magazine. TROUBLED EGYPT, AND THE LATE KHEDIVE. ence, he has finally lost his liberty, and is doomed now to drag on until the end the chains of gilded captivity in his splendid prison-palace of Emirghian on the Bosphorus shore. THERE is a tendency in this country among educated and liberal-minded people - among people even who have followed To me it has always argued a grave the course of events in the world of politics deterioration of that keen, bright intellect during the past twenty years with close that Ismail so unquestionably possessed, attention and an interest beyond the aver- that he should have permitted himself to age to heap upon the shoulders of one be tempted into a visit to Constantinople. man the primary blame for all that long He cannot have concealed from himself 'ist of crushing misfortunes in Egypt its dangers. He would never in his which began with the ruinous concession younger days have essayed to confront for the Suez Canal and culminated in the them. Yet he went, not blindfold; he death of Gordon at Khartoum. The men- had before his eyes examples of what he tion of this man's name in conversation must expect. There were already in and calls forth the stilted smile that greets an around Stamboul several bright birds of equivocal allusion, coupled with a head- gaudy plumage, from Tunis, from Baghshake of reprobation of his manifold wick- dad, and elsewhere — though none so rare edness. Stories of his loose, dissolute as he - breaking their beaks against the life, his spoilt-child caprices, his wanton gold bars of their cages, but knowing that extravagances, and his reckless, unthink- their struggles were vain. Yet, despite all ing expenditure, are in all our memories this, he ventured into the snare, and side by side with dark tales of his cruel- Europe will know him no more. ties to a people already crushed to the earth beneath their burden; of extortions from a patient, starving peasantry, by the teeth of the scourge, of the means to gratify his unbridled passions; of treacheries to trusted friends, of unscrupulous use of hideous secret means for removing a foe whom he feared or making a place for a parasite whom he favored. To many minds, indeed, the worst types of Oriental tyranny and license engrafted with the ex-tration of his country in a condition of otic refinements of Western depravity are embodied in the person of Ismail Pasha. It is no part of my present purpose to parade as the apologist of the ex-khedive. With the blame cast upon him, though much of it is unjust, I have nothing to do. It is my intention, indeed, to refer to him only in so far as his acts cannot be disassociated from their consequences to his son. For himself, whatever be his faults, his vices, his criminality even, he has surely paid the penalty amply and in full. Shorn of all save the merest semblance of state, reft of all power, hurled from place, and robbed of fortune, of honors, of the opportunity for intrigue, and of that yet more precious possession, the joy of detecting and combating intrigue in others, which was the very essence of his exist The reign of Ismail can be summed up in two well-known sentences: "Great expectations," "large deductions." It was essentially a reign of action. It teemed with mighty projects which were carried, many of them, to most successful issue, and if this result was invariably attained at stupendous, at crushing cost, the fault lay not entirely with the ex-khedive. On Ismail's accession, he found the adminis the chaotic decay. Nothing remained but the He hated foreigners. He avoided the society of natives, and shut himself up entirely from the world; and, after four years' reign, when the order came from Stamboul that he should be strangled as a punishment for suspected treason against the suzerain, he had none to help him to resist his fate, and died as miserably as he had lived. been different. He died, however, after a reign of only two months, and the power devolved upon his nephew, Abbas. Abbas Pasha may be said to have been a man of order, inasmuch as he died without debts. But this was perhaps the only good thing that came of his reign. He treated Egypt like a conquered province. He was a tyrant, cruel and hard with the people yet his able and well-regulated administra. His successor, Said, a surviving son of tion eased their burden. At his death the Mehemet Ali, was a man of very different army numbered eighty thousand men and complexion. He was as fond of show and twenty thousand Bashi-bazouks. Every- extravagance as Abbas had been of parthing was in perfect order. Artillery, cav-simony and order. An autocrat, full of alry, equipment, nothing was lacking, and whims and caprice, he early abolished the yet there was no deficit in the budget. He cannot, however, be called an enlightened prince. On his accession, the original idea occurred to him to hold a public general examination of both the teachers and pupils of the schools founded by Mehemet Ali. The examination took place in his presence at Abou-Zabel, with results so disastrous to both masters and boys that Abbas decreed the immediate closing of all schools. In their place he founded the Mafroussa, a nursery intended for the training of officers for the army. It has been said of Abbas that he was possessed of much common sense. But it may be argued that he lacked discrimination. This was indeed the cause of his undoing. He had a whimsical fancy, and permitted himself to follow its dictates. On one occasion, for instance, when the important question of the huge dam across the fork of the Nile some twenty miles below Cairo was urged upon him, he grew impatient. "You are always worrying me about your 'barrage,'" he said; "an idea has struck me. Those great masses of stone, the Pyramids, are standing in the desert useless. Why not take the stone from them? Is it not a good idea?" Another time when his prime minister, Hassan Pasha Monasterli, implored him to sign a decree prohibiting the sale of hasheesh, Abbas demurred. "The people must take something to amuse themselves," he said. "If I prohibit hasheesh, they will buy rakki from the Greeks, who will put revolutionary ideas into their heads. Hasheesh stupefies; rakki excites the brain." Council of Ministers, with which none of his predecessors had interfered. He wished to do and to be everything himself, and though some of his ideas were good, he lacked anything approaching to system. Like Abbas he took great interest in his army, yet in it he was constantly making absurd changes. One day he would have fifty thousand men, the next day half or double the number, according to the impulse of the moment. Yet it was Said who first endeavored to introduce some sort of order into the administration of the Soudan provinces, which he had found on his accession in a deplorable condition. Abbas had applied a system of his own to the Soudan, which may account to some extent for his immunity from debt at the time of his death. He maintained a large force in the annexed provinces for the simple purpose of extorting exorbitant taxes from a discontented population. It was under his auspices that in 1853 the first trading voyage to the Upper Nile was started by Mr. Petherick, an English merchant, and consul for England at Khartoum. Petherick was followed by other traders, who established posts far up country, and organized armed bands under Arab commanders. It was soon found that slavehunting paid even better than ivory, and raids were therefore made on the surrounding tribes. With the resolution of organizing a better state of things, Said, in the year 1857, made a rapid tour through the Soudan provinces. At Berber he proclaimed the abolition of slavery; at Khartoum he organized a new government for the five | Koenig Bey begged him to reopen the provinces then forming the Egyptian schools suppressed by Abbas, he replied Soudan i.e., Kordofan, Sennar, Taka, blandly, "Why open the eyes of the Berber, and Dongola. He ordered that people? they will only be more difficult to the excessive taxes on the lands and on rule." He was brave, though wanting in the water-wheels of the people should be moral courage; he was well disposed to discontinued, and he established postal his family, to whom he restored their esservices on dromedaries across the desert. tates confiscated by Abbas; and he was That journey of Said from Cairo to recklessly generous. He paid for the Khartoum is still remembered, still talked decoration of one of the reception-rooms of throughout the Soudan. I have heard at Abdin Palace the enormous sum of ten of it at Halfa and at Dongola at Mas- million francs, and had so little sense of sauah, and at Senhiet, and at Suakim. At the worth of the money that when M. Dongola my head camel-driver and guide, Bravais (who, by the way, was the original a Tunisian bedawee, whose proud boast of Daudet's "Nabob ") complained that a it was that he had accompanied the expe- certain estimate in Italian lire had been dition, never tired of telling the glories taken too low, he simply replied, "Well, of that triumphal progress, when Said, put it in English livres," and it was done. in a carriage-and-four, surrounded by an army of fifty thousand men, followed the bank of the Nile for nineteen hundred miles. The horrors of that terrific march, - the fearful mortality of troops, the utter ruin of the populace after the passage of this devastating locust-flight, the tyranny, the exactions that heralded its approach -all are forgotten; only the bright memory remains of "the great pasha," bedizened with gold, rolling in a carriage (the only wheeled vehicle ever seen in the country) over the broken rocks and through the drifting sands, and distributing smiles to the cowering villagers. The anti-climax to Said's Soudan reforms came very soon. About the year | 1860 the European traders sold their stations to their Arab agents, who paid rental to the Egyptian government. Then was the heyday of the djellabat (slave-dealers), of Zubehr Rahama and Suleiman his son, and the misery and ruin of the people was increased tenfold. Said was in every way the reverse of Abbas. He was sociable, quick, witty, loving especially the society of foreigners an agreeable conversationalist, speaking French like a Parisian, and enjoying of all things the intricate witticisms of which that language is capable. In common with all the members of the khedivial family he possessed a great sense of humor, and he was a wit of no mean order. Like Abbas he was no patron of public instruction. When one day his old tutor Said's title to remembrance by posterity, however, and it forms my chief reason for mention of him, is in the fact that to him belongs the doubtful merit of having contracted the first Egyptian loan. As a consequence of his commitments to the Suez Canal Company, amounting to nearly £4,000,000, added to the pressure of a heavy floating debt, Said found himself forced to saddle his country with a public loan and a public debt. In 1862 he concluded the first public loan in London, with Fruhling, Goschen, & Co. (in room of two private loans made previously in Paris). The amount was £3,292,800 at seven per cent., and one per cent. amortization, but it realized only two and a half millions, showing therefore a dead loss of £800,000 (which at eight per cent. represented a payment of £64,000, for money never seen). Having accomplished this, he died, and left to his successor a burden of ten millions of liability, three millions of which was foreign debt; a rotten administration, great disorder, and in addition the for Egypt-disastrous Suez Canal concession, with all its ruinous and mischievous obligations. This concession, by the way, it is freely asserted, M. de Lesseps easily persuaded him to sign, without even having read it. This, doubtless his worst act, was one of which he never appeared to comprehend the gravity; for though when near death he freely expressed regret that he had burdened his country with a public debt and loan, |