Be these things as they may, it seems admitted on all hands that Abbas Pasha has now completely thrown overboard the party which he courted so assiduously as heir-apparent, and is seeking foreign, especially English, support. All this is fair enough provided he does not fall into the old error of sacrificing the natives entirely to strangers, as did his great predecessor, and provided he do not allow himself to be persuaded by flatterers—and he has flatterers; what man in power has not?—to engage in grand undertakings for the purpose of emulating the renown of the old Pharaohs. Egypt wants neither a resuscitation of old times, nor a hasty imitation of the new. She has to find out the form of its own civilization: and modern improvements, as they have been hitherto introduced, will only weigh her down into despair.
But it is said that Abbas Pasha has no views at all about the progress of the arts, and manufactures, and commerce; no thought of the amelioration of the country; but that in endeavoring to gain the good-will of Europe, he wants to serve some ambitious projects of his own. There may be something in this. Not that it is probable he intends to play the old game over again and throw off the yoke of Stamboul; but there is certainly a very arduous struggle now carrying on, both by open and underhand means, between Egypt and the Porte. There is an infinity of points of difference between the vassal and his lord; but the gist of the matter is, that the former wishes to preserve all the privileges, to be treated with the same indulgence, to be left with the same freedom of action, as his grandfather; he wishes to remain, in fact, a vassal little more than in name, free to indulge any arbitrary whims; whilst the latter is attempting, with some reason,—with great reason indeed, but perhaps in too precipitate a manner, and actuated by feelings that resemble private grudge,—to reduce Egypt to the same subjection as the rest of the Ottoman Empire.
The discussion is a serious one, and much may be said on both sides; but it must be accorded at once in favor of the Porte, that the Viceroy of Egypt is not to be considered as an independent sovereign merely paying tribute to a superior power, but as an officer of the Empire. Certainly, he holds a distinguished position; and his case is an exceptional one; but very imprudent would be any who should advise him to take the same ground as Mohammed Ali, even after his defeat and expulsion from Syria, was allowed to assume. He has been levying troops, and is said even to have victualled his fleet to give more weight to his negotiations; but it is not probable he will draw the sword when, by giving way a little, he may establish a character for moderation, and be left undisturbed in a position sufficiently splendid to satisfy a very respectable ambition.
On the other hand, it is hoped that no undue heat, no petty jealousy, no minor considerations of self-love—excited and encouraged by the numerous runagates from Egypt, as Artin Bey and his fellows—will finally govern the councils of Constantinople. Many missions have passed from this country to the Porte with the object of warding off the blows that are being aimed at the authority of Abbas Pasha. Probably they ask too much, as is always done in such cases; but, if reports speak true, they have been answered with an asperity which seems calculated rather to provoke a quarrel than to lead to a satisfactory settlement. The great question now is about the Tanzamat promulgated by the Porte, which may be briefly described as a well-intended attempt to introduce some kind of order into the administration of the empire, to substitute certain rules in place of arbitrary will, and generally to control the actions of what are called the great men in their relations with those who, we suppose, may be described as the little men. Such a scheme, even if imperfect in its details and difficult to be applied, must command our sympathies. The provinces of the Turkish empire—and Egypt is at least as great in degree as the remainder—have been too long the sport of caprice; and if it be the secret object of Abbas Pasha utterly to prevent the introduction of this new system—to refuse it even a fair trial—he will most certainly, whatever may be the effect of obstinate passive resistance, receive no countenance or support from England.
It is said, however, that he merely desires—and such is the purport of his remonstrances—that certain modifications, adapted to the peculiar situation of Egypt, shall be made. The Porte is the best judge as to how far these modifications are compatible with the spirit of its decree; and as the communications that have taken place have been chiefly verbal, we will not take upon ourselves to say whether they are even suggested by any peculiar necessity. The negotiations are in progress; and all we can say is, that unless Abbas Pasha be considered too dangerous a subject, and his removal be desired, it will be better to make up by amenity of procedure for the inexorable requirements of principle.
There was one great grievance in Mohammed Ali's time, namely, the existence of the ferdeh, or tax of one-twelfth upon income of all kinds, down to that of the poorest fellah. This was a great outrage on legality. It was opposed to all the constitutions of the Turkish empire; and it was understood that, after the Syrian affair, it should be voluntarily done away with by the Pasha. But an easy source of revenue is not easily given up; and, in spite of all remonstrances, the tax was maintained. There was no burden to which the people objected more than this. They paid,—but they murmured somewhat loudly; and even in the coffee-houses many were sometimes bold enough to say the ferdeh was illegal. On one occasion, when Ibrahim Pasha was in Cairo, not long before his father's death, there was the semblance of a riot on the subject; but the stick and the halter were brought into play, and the conviction produced that, legal or not legal, the tax must be paid. Abbas Pasha himself for some time allowed this copious fountain to gush into his treasury; but it now suited the policy of the Porte to return vigorously to the charge in favor of legality; and towards the end of last year the ferdeh was finally abolished to the infinite delight of the whole population. The long-wished-for event was celebrated by illuminations in Alexandria and Cairo; and the general joy might have risen to something like enthusiasm had not a fresh, though temporary, cause of discontent accompanied the boon.
This was the conscription, which nearly drove Egypt into a revolt last winter. In old times, when soldiers were wanted, men were pounced upon suddenly wherever they could be found, and marched off, leaving great grief behind; but before any dangerous excitement could be got up. This was justly considered a barbarous and inartificial method; and when, for what purposes remains a mystery, a certain levy of men was required, it was determined to proceed with regularity, and to make each district furnish its quota according to the number of inhabitants. The idea, at first sight, seems both fair and wise; and if the people could have been got to acquiesce in the necessity of their supplying soldiers in any proportion at all, would have worked very well. But as nobody in Egypt wants to shoulder a musket, as everybody has the utmost hatred and abhorrence of military service, arising partly from constitutional want of energy, but chiefly from the knowledge that the soldier is ill-paid[13] and ill-fed, and rarely, if ever, returns—we never met but one old discharged campaigner in the country—it is not surprising if the public announcement of the intentions of Government produced the greatest possible perturbation. The first impulse of the whole adult population, except those who could boast of some very undoubted claim of exemption, was to fly to the mountains; and every defile, every cavern, every catacomb, every quarry in the Libyan and Arabian chains, were soon tenanted by people running away from enlistment. Wherever we went in our excursions, we became accustomed to see lines of human beings perched like crows on the summit of seemingly inaccessible cliffs, on the look-out for the enemy in the shape of the Sheikh-el-Beled; for the task of catching and forwarding the prescribed number of "strong active young men" devolved on the civil authority, aided sometimes by that estimable rural police, the Arnaout irregular cavalry. On many occasions we surprised these poor people in their retreats; and once, when they mistook us for recruiters, were assailed with slings diverted from their original purpose, namely, that of frightening the sparrows away from the crops. Accounts reached us at several places that blood had been shed; and the affair in various ways rendered our journey somewhat melancholy. Now we came upon a large town, as Geneh, seemingly deserted by its whole population, with closed shops and silent streets; then we met a party of recruits, chained neck and neck, going to their destination; and anon we saw a crowd of women, driven to despair by the loss of son, or husband, or brother, tossing up their arms, tearing their garments, and invoking curses on their oppressors. Public opinion in all despotic countries finds utterance through the weaker sex; they dare to say what would perhaps bring condign punishment on the men; they nearly made a revolt once in Cairo under Mohammed Ali, and on the present occasion they expressed their mind pretty freely. Some of the more noisy brought a good beating on themselves from some irascible Sheikh; but in general their anathemas were received with a kind of sheepish deprecating good-humor. It was difficult to ascertain how many recruits were at last got together, but, as near as I could gather, the number ordered was one in about every 180 souls.
The sight of so much unhappiness naturally excited great indignation and disgust; but not so much perhaps on reflection as the permanent misery and ill-treatment of a great proportion of the population. Abbas Pasha has taken the old system as he found it, and, with the exception of the abolition of the ferdeh, has done nothing to alleviate the condition of the fellah. It is especially on the lands of the great men, the pashas and the beys, that these poor serfs are worst off. Their profession is that of agricultural laborers, but it must not be supposed that they have freedom to carry their services to what master they will. They belong to the land as much as do the palm-trees; and the nature of their occupation, their hours of labor, and their pay, are regulated by their lord and master in a perfectly arbitrary way. At Randa, opposite Sheikh Abadeh, we found a sugar estate occupying 1,300 men, and endeavored to ascertain in as exact a manner as possible how they were treated. We found that, in the first place, they were, of course, forced to work, both on the land and in the factory, at a nominal pay of twenty-five paras, or three-halfpence a head, and that some of them were in active employment nearly eighteen hours a day. Now it is possible for a man to exist on such wages in that part of Egypt, even with a family; and as bare existence is considered in most countries an adequate reward for unintelligent labor, there seemed not so much reason to complain. But then came the question, how was the payment made? The answer in substance was, the men are paid twenty-five paras a day, but they never get the money; they receive what is called its value in the refuse molasses; but this only when it can be of little service to them, when the owner of the estate has glutted the market, and they can only sell at a loss of forty or fifty per cent. They would be only too happy to receive fifteen paras in hard cash; as it is, some of them necessarily eke out their living by stealing, and others by the produce of little plots of land, which they cultivate at night when they should be reposing after the fatigues of the day. The women and children assist them, when the latter are not pressed into what is called the service of the state; that is, compelled to dig canals, and perform other light work for which they receive neither pay nor food. Their parents bring them food, or some charitable person flings them a morsel of coarse bread, otherwise they would perish.
Such is pretty nearly the state of things in the private possessions of all the descendants of Mohammed Ali. In fairness, however, we must remind the reader that Abbas Pasha is only answerable for acquiescing in customs handed down. He has not established any new pernicious regulation that we have heard of; and even if he remain perfectly quiescent and leave things to go their own gait, King Log is better than King Stork. The mischievous activity of Mohammed Ali is not to be regretted; and if, by the influence of Constantinople prudently exercised, some little check is gradually put upon the caprices and violence of the proprietors who call themselves princes—and it is for the interest of Abbas Pasha that this should be the case—Egypt, though not possessed of all the happiness she wants, might not be very discontented, and would have no reason to look back with regret on the time of the old pasha. According to all accounts, some classes of the agricultural laborers are gradually enriching themselves in spite of the burdens which they bear; and, although wealth is timid to show itself, a great amelioration in the state of the country may soon be perceptible.