“There was at the moment of which I speak some little commotion in the city on account of a dearth of rice, the diet of the poorer classes, or at least the diet of the poorer classes when they could obtain it; for there was a custom deeply rooted in this conservative people that when the poorer classes could not obtain rice, they should do without it.
“At this juncture the difficulty had risen to the middle classes, and these joined with the populace. Ill ease grew general. A complaint of stringency was abroad, from the ranks of those who starved to death up to the merchants and the lords themselves. Even the moderately rich could no longer afford the services of more than a dozen dancing girls.
“The whole Island was in a ferment and the capital was so disturbed that one might have thought oneself at times among the degraded tribes of the Mainland.
“Processions had appeared in the streets, sometimes actually accompanied by musical instruments of a loud and distressing order. Banners had been carried, and upon one occasion the litter of no less a person than the Lord Executioner had been detained for half an hour in a block caused by the multitudes proceeding to hear a favourite orator. The Council had taken note of these things and my friend the Tribune Tarib, the Lord Doubler, was naturally deputed to deal with them in his own inimitable way.
“He went on foot to the vast meeting that had been convened in the Mosque of Nasr-ed-din the founder of the Dynasty. We also went with him thus humbly, the better to please the public eye. With some dozen others of my rank I sat upon a rug immediately at the foot of the orator and listened entranced to his impassioned words.
“Never had I heard him more inspired! It was a great volume of sound, the words in which followed each other in quick succession, often meaningless but never pedantic, and throughout the speech he was careful to interpolate short passages which the meanest intellect could clearly follow and which exactly corresponded to the desires of his hearers. ‘Why should you starve?’ cried he, ‘while all around you is wealth? Which the wealthy will be the first to forego.’ Murmurs of applause burst from the lips of the Treasurer and the Grand Vizier, while I myself—I am not ashamed to say—cried aloud in my enthusiasm for the sentiment. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘do you lack your poor pittance of rice while the bloated rich’—and he looked round at the galleries as though to find them there—‘have their fill of the tenderest lamb stuffed with pistachio nuts? And who shall blame them?’ Again there rose a wave of applause in which I joined more heartily than ever, for the words reminded me of that delicious viand, which I had, but an hour before, very plentifully consumed. ‘Why,’—he shouted in louder tones—‘Why do you permit yourselves to be loaded with an intolerable burden of taxation? Which our wealthier classes bear also in an immoderate degree?’
“At this phrase the exultation of the Lord Chief Treasurer knew no bounds, and he led the stream of cheering which it so richly deserved. ‘How long are we to wait for that reform which our fathers—especially among the gentry—demanded and so nearly obtained?’ He looked round upon them for a moment in a dramatic pause, and then said in solemn tones, ‘A tax upon the worthless rich, and more especially’ (yet louder) ‘upon the alien rich and more especially still’ (his voice now booming like a hammering of drums) ‘upon the alien rich who stand idle fattening upon the revenues of the State, this I say....’ But the delirium of acquiescence aroused by this noble sentiment cut off the rest of his phrase and drowned his voice for the space in which a man might recite the prayer for the Caliph.
“Used as I was to this style of public eloquence and the expression of opinions universal to this happy people (bound up, as I thought, with the very atmosphere of their race) I naturally expected that when the dying down of the applause should have allowed him to be heard we should have that second part of which his speeches had always consisted—an appeal to the conservative instincts of our race, to their noble patience and to their dogged tenacity in doing nothing which had made them the envy of their less-gifted neighbours.
“Bitterly was I undeceived!