"Prodigious is the iteration of books concerning the 'poor down-trodden Fellah,' serving sentimentality to contrast him with his Pharaohs, the Pashas and Beys who oppress him and his. This philanthropic and most ignorant twaddle began (not honestly) with the French invasion, endured through the age of Lane and Gardner Wilkinson, and is repeated in the old stock phrases by the latest writers, Baron de Mahortié and Dicey. Foreigners mostly know the city folk; their 'manners and customs of the modern Egyptians' should be called the 'manners and customs of Cairo.' Ask Mr. Charles Clarke of Zagázíg, or Mr. Curzon Tompson of Cairo, men who, never holding high official positions, could study the Fellah in his own home. They will confirm my statement that there is nowhere a more dogged and determined, turbulent and refractory, furious and fanatical, cruel and bloodthirsty race than these clowns of the 'Black Land.' Compared with them the 'finest pisantry' are a weak and violent race; nor do they produce, like the Felláhin, typical and remarkable men. This generation has seen the Mufattish, a son of the soil, who could hold his own against the ablest financiers of Europe, and who had amassed millions of money, when one fine night he was tumbled into the Nile. It has produced Arábi the Reb., who, despite his notorious want of physical pluck, has graved his name upon the memorial tablets of his native valley. Aided by the weakness of his opponents, he placed the captor between the horns of an exceptional dilemma. If put to death he would have become a Shahíd or martyr. If allowed to live, even in exile, it was because the Káfir feared to slay him, and because it will soon be found advisable to recall him.
"A few words concerning the early career of this modern Prætorian may be acceptable; his later career is known to all. Arábi, not Ourabi, and mispronounced Arăby, probably an echo of 'Araby the blest,' is neither a Frenchman, nor a Spaniard, nor an Irishman, nor a green-turban'd Sayyid. His father, an honest Fellah, ploughed the old paternal fields about Kafr el-Taur ('Bull village'), between Tantah and Birkat el-Saba', stations on the Alexandria-Cairo railway. His mother, who has been interviewed by more than one Englishwoman, and who is now living at El-Hurríyyah ('Liberty'), her son's proprietary village near Zagázíg, sent her three boys as volunteers to serve and die for Said Pasha. This remarkable step, for the Egyptian parent invariably did and does the reverse, attracted the ruler's attention to the lads. He placed them in the military college, and he was heard to say, according to his widow, an honest Anglophobe, that he expected great things from Arábi.
"But Arábi preferred studying theology, which means bigotry, at El-Azhar, the University-mosque of Cairo, where professors are numbered by hundreds, and pupils by thousands. He had risen to be Kaimmakám (Major), when his patron died. Ismail Khedive would have nothing to do with him: 'the man,' he said, 'has the eye of a Hayyeh' (snake). So he was kept on outpost duty till circumstances brought him to the fore, especially on February 1st, 1881, when his Azhar training proved peculiarly valuable. In 1882 he became the pivot of the situation. His right was that of being, after a fashion, the representative man; his claim was having posed before Egypt, England, and Europe as the Leader of the National Party.
"Returning to the Fellah, I would note that this race stands aloof from and above all its neighbours. As hair, features, and figure prove, the Nilote is of African not of Asiatic provenance, partly white-washed by foreign innervation. Mr. Lane dubbed him an 'Arab,' and derived him from the invading soldiery of Amru and other early Moslem conquerors, a handful whose nationality would be at once absorbed, would disappear in the next generation. You have only to place the Bedawi by the side of the Fellah, and the fallacy of the theory becomes palpable. The Fellah's half-brother is the Copt, who has kept his blood freer from 'miscegenation.' Both are perforce peculiar peoples. The climate of the Nile Valley allows no foreign-born to be viable; in its media neither Greek nor Roman, Persian, Turk, nor Circassian, German, Italian, Frenchman, nor Englishman, can permanently increase and multiply. It has thus an atmosphere of perfect conservatism. From the days of the monuments and of Herodotus, the Fellah has altered little but his faith: he preserves all the good and every bad and bitter quality of his forbears.
"The Home Press, when commenting upon the bloodshed and arson of June 11th, asked with wonder, how these 'lambs had suddenly turned wolves?' Lambs, indeed! why, no fighting ram is more obstinate and pugnacious, or less open to pity and mercy, than an Egyptian Fellah. And if the men are brutal and barbarous, the women are, if possible, worse; as mostly happens in hot damp climates, their morals are abominable, and, as Mr. Lane and the 'Arabian Nights' show, their modes of murdering are unutterably horrible. The account of these bestial beings, promenading the streets of Alexandria with the legs and arms of slaughtered Europeans, borne like flags on long staves, should open eyes that can be opened.
"The morbid philanthropy and the mawkish humanitarianism of modern days have created a theoretical, an ideal, Fellah; the factual man would start to see his own portrait. They must deserve compassion who have anything to do with him. There is hardly a European in Egypt who has frequented the villages as a sportsman or antiquary without being assaulted by the villagers, while several of my friends have been nearly killed. The peasants also act as their own police and 'ministers of high justice,' trying and punishing all criminal cases within their mud walls. If man or woman break the law, especially that of Rasm, or immemorial custom, the offence is kept from the guardians of society—policemen and magistrates, the worst robbers in the land. If certain 'commandments' be violated, he, she, or it, is carefully tied and trussed up, gagged, and thrown into the Great River. Father Nilus could tell more tales of murder than all the streams in the United Kingdom.
"Among the Fellah's good qualities we must not neglect his persistence and his bravery. A drive to the Pyramids will show you troops of half-naked urchins running a mile in the forlorn hope of a copper; and in this point the boy is the father of the man. The adult will be bastinado'd within an inch of his life before he pays his lawful rent, and his wife praises him as she dresses his wounds. Under Sesostris, who invented the phalanx, the Fellah-soldier overran the nearer East. Under Mohammed Ali and Ibrahim Pashas he beat the Arabs at Bissel and the Turks at Nezíb. Even a Moltke could not then save the Ottoman, and the late General Jochmus told me that he escaped defeat, when commanding the Tartar cavalry, only by systematically declining battle with Ibrahim Pasha and his Nilotic armies.
"The dogged pluck of the gunners at the Alexandrian forts and at Tel el-Kebir proves, that the stock has not degenerated; the easy final defeat is readily explained. There was treachery in the air, and the best and bravest men will not stand firm when they suspect that their right-hand, or left-hand neighbours, have been paid to leave them in the lurch. Had the rebels been disciplined, and led by English or French Officers, there would have been a very different tale. As a rule the sight of blood does not excite or terrify the Egyptian; it only makes him an 'uglier customer.'
"Such is the Fellah, the peculiar growth of long centuries. There are races, says M. Gambetta bluntly and truly, which want the rule of the rod. 'The green wand,' declares the Arab proverb, 'is from the trees of Paradise.' The abolition of the Kurbáj, or cowhide, had something to do with the late movement. The hill-peasant must either be beaten or beat; be tyrannized over or tyrannize: in the latter case, like the beggar on horseback, he beats to the death. Here it is no mercy to spare the stick; all forbearance is attributed to the ignoblest motive, craven fear; and the fancy that he is 'funked' makes even the coward brave. It is bad to bastinado, but it is better than to hang and shoot.
"From Zagázíg to Suez is one of the most rickety and dangerous bits of railway travelled over by Europeans. I have seen a single train catch fire twice in one day. You are pretty sure to be told of one which, a few hours ago, 'derailed' and made the hapless passengers pass a cold and hungry night in the waste. The only interest of the dangerous line is the casualty of running through the theatre of our latest campaign. War which, they say, teaches the British Public its geography, also brings into prominence and ennobles names known only to a local peasantry. Such are Kassásín, a lock-bridge over the Sweetwater Canal; Tel el-Mahútah, a mean ground-swell, where the Campaign and Mr. Neville have brought to life certain marvellous Pharaohnic remains; Mahsamah, an outpost station on the edge of Wady Tumilát, southern limit of the Land of Goshen; and Tel el-Kebír, which minor poets are invited to pronounce Keb-eer, not Kee-ber. The latter in 1878 was a mean village, distinguished only by tumble-down cavalry barracks of the Khedivial age, the Age of Modern Ruins. The name 'great mound' (Tel) alludes to a rubbish-heap which was removed for building-ground. There is a brother-hamlet, Tel el-Sagher (Little-mound) hard by, and it has suffered sorely in the maps.