SENIOR'S CONVERSATIONS AND JOURNALS IN EGYPT AND MALTA.* Tins record

of the impressions made upon the singularly keen and receptive mind of the indefatigable Master in Chancery, during a stay of some four months in Egypt in 1856, at a peculiarly interesting period of its history, will be read with as much profit as pleasure at the present moment. The journals are full of materials for history, and are excellently edited. The study of these volumes will be especially useful to those whose favourite Egyptian policy consists in leaving the Egyptians to "stew in their own juice,"—a nauseous and cynical phrase, which has of late been repeated to satiety. Every page testifies to the wanton cruelty of the process, and to the dulled and callous indifference to misery and oppression which is not the least baneful of its results. "I hear unpleasant stories about this man," said one of Mehemet Ali's Colonels to Mougil Bey, referring to a Mudir ; "they say he saws the Fellahs in two. Now, I can understand flogging and banging, but I cannot stand sawing. If that be true, I really cannot take his coffee." Abbas, the second Viceroy, found a woman smoking in the harem ; he sewed up her mouth with his own hand, as he boasted shortly after- wards to an Englishman, to whom he displayed his bloody hand, and allowed her to die of hunger. Mr. Senior went to see the Fellahs employed in the construction of the Suez Railway. "They were as truly worked under the lash," he records, "as a horse is. This, however," be adds, " is not offensive in Egypt.

In the railway trains, the third-class passengers are admonished to sit by being struck on the head by the sticks of the railway porters." On the same occasion, he saw a gang of men under the superintendence of a couple of lads of fifteen, who were thrashing them, not with sticks, but with whips, and that severely. They got no pay, but a kind of receipt, which might in rare instances be taken in payment of taxes. On a second visit to the same works, he heard the men singing at their task, but not songs of joy. Hekekyan Bey, a Syrian in the service of Egypt, who was his companion, translated the rudely metrical dialogue, which is pathetic enough :—

" Strophe. We are all in rags, we are all in rage.'

Antrop/ie. That the Sheykh may be dressed in cloth 1

Boys. They starve us, they starve us !'

Girls. They beat us, they beat us !'

Boys. 'But there's some one above,

There's some one above.'

Girls. Who will punish them well,

Punish them well.'" Abbas put eighty of his immediate attendants to death. Even Said, usually described as a mild ruler, butchered Bedouins by hundreds, and throughout the length and breadth of Egypt, up to quite recent years, each grade of society was entirely at the mercy of all the grades above it, while the life and property of every Egyptian was held at the mere caprice of the Pasha. This is the sort of "stewing in their own juice "to which the Egyptians have been subjected for so many ages, that it is no -wonder that all fibre and sinew have been taken out of the national character. Hekekyan Bey, of whom Mr. Senior, as we are told in a note, "thought more highly than of any of his Eastern friends," saw in the foreign interest taken in its affairs the only hope for his adopted country ; without that, he believed it must sink back into an ordinary Turkish Pa,shalic, and 'even as an independent State would be "only one degree less miserable, but still wretched beyond the conception of an European." Senior himself, however, was opposed to any inter-

ference. His solution of the problem as it then stood was to buy out the Sultan, and declare Egypt a neutral country under a Christian sovereign and administrator, not necessarily taken from a Royal House, but selected on account of his administra- tive talents. Nor did the office need to be hereditary, or even for life. "To be the representative and organ of European civilisa- tion in Egypt for ten years, or even for five years, would be a grand object of ambition to the most distinguished statesman." Such a solution would be by no means a bad one, but it involves the creation of an Amphietyonic Council in Europe, which the present century, at all events, is not likely to see.

M. de Lesseps, in his conversations with Mr. Senior, puts Mehemet Ali as high, if not higher, than Napoleon, who

Conversations and Journals in Egypt and Melta. By the late William NitS8(111

Senior. Edited by his Danghter, M. C. M. Simpson. 2 vols. London Sampson Low. 1482.

had excellent materials and excellent instruments, while the former had neither, a fact which certainly ought not to be lost sight of in judging his conduct. Mougil Bey's estimate was almost equally favourable. Pitiless, remorseless, and unscrupu- lous as the founder of the present dynasty was, he had at least, a great aim, and was not naturally of a cruel disposition. His violence was due in a great measure to the hurry he was in to see his projects realised. Cobden, who has left a most interesting account of his visit to Egypt in 1836, and who had two inter- views with Mehemet Ali, found in him all the signs of an "amiable and jocular fellow," but, nevertheless, could "trace in him only a rapacious tyrant." One thing, at all events, is certain ; he began the process, however, roughly, of lifting Egypt out of the degradation into which the country had fallen under the tyranny of the shifting Matneluke oligarchy, and his memory is still regretted by the people. Abbas, his successor, was a despot of the vulgarest type. He was suspicious and cowardly, and in consequence cruel and treacherous. The difficulty of determining whether he was assassinated or died a natural death shows how hard it is to get at the truth in Egypt, and is paralleled by the contemporary problem of Arabi's guilt or innocence. Abbas's physician, a Frenchman, declared he died of apoplexy, the rest of the world maintained, he had been murdered, but no two of Mr. Senior's informants seem to have agreed upon the manner of his death. Oriental evidence can only be safely treated as a tissue of falsehoods, from which, by a kind of deductive process, a mire or less shadowy truth may be inferred. Of Said, the predecessor of Ismail, the most various opinions were expressed ; but, on the whole, he seems to have been regarded favourably. The merits of the dynasty were summed up by Hekekyau, who declared that it had "no root in the country," and that "a more street-row in Cairo or Alexandria. might turn them out," a surmise of which recent events have demonstrated the acuteness.

Notwithstanding the helplessness of the Fellah, "there is," it was justly remarked to Mr. Senior, "nothing degraded in his submission, nothing abject in his servility." Islam is essentially democratic, or, to speak more correctly, 4galitarian ; the only dis- tinction of persons recognised by the Koran is between the Faithful and Unbelievers. Any one who has visited Egypt must have been struck by the almost independent bearing of the Egyptian in the presence of his master or superior, offering what an English- man cannot but feel to be a somewhat painful contrast with the awkward timidity of many of his countrymen when addressed by a nobleman. One reason of this absence of servility, no doubt, is the nearly equal ignorance of all classes. Of the late Assembly of Notables, it was said that not more than a dozen could read or write. Mehemet Ali himself could not read, at the age of forty-seven. Nearly all the clerks in the Government offices are Copts or Syrians, the natives being too uneducated for • the duties. Another is, that the Koran forms practically their only literature and ethical code. Further, every man tastes the sweets of tyranny in some degree ; the lowest peasaut is as much a despot within the walls of his house, as the Nazir over his district, the Mudir over his province, or the Pasha over all. There is hardly any public opinion in Egypt, in the modern sense of the expression. Polygamy necessitates the seclusion of women, as we see in Utah, and thus intercourse, even between near relations, is very restricted. The fear of the "evil eye" is still prevalent, though less so than at the date of Mr. Senior's visit, and operates in the same direc- tion. The evil eye is really the glance of envy or covetousness, so often followed in the East by some kind of spoliation ; hence, a mere look came to be regarded as causally connected with conse- quent misfortune. The fatalism of Islam is likewise in great measure answerable for the lack of public spirit. The Christian, as Mr. Senior points out, believes that events happen according to rules, which be may learn and avail himself of; but the Mahommedan creed is that every event is caused separately bj the will of God, acting independently of all rules.. Hence, the Mahommedan has no motive to exert himself; his duty begins and ends with a patient acceptance of whatever betides. The tenure of land in Egypt was investigated with some care by Mr. Senior. Up to quite recently, the Fellah was little more than a tenant-at-will, with a vague and not often enforcible right of compensation for improvements. Owing to the indirect operation of the Code, his condition has approached that of a freeholder subject to a perpetual rent, and the frequent purchases of land by foreigners have tended to enlarge the dominium of the no hatti.vee peasant. He is still, no doubt, subjected more or less t

petty tyranny of the local tax-gatherer ; but his principal enemy, at the present day, is the foreign money-lender. The Polhill has a passion for land which amounts almost to madness. All that he can acquire he successively mortgages, when he can, to procure the funds to acquire more ; and of this proclivity the Jew or Greek money-dealer is not slow to take advantage. The practice can only be checked by an enactment rendering mort- gages invalid beyond a certain per-centage of the value of the subject of the mortgage. The registrar, too, might be compelled to explain to the mortgagor the nature and the effect of the instrument.

Mr. Senior evidently looked upon the Pyramids as useless heaps of stone. Their character as tombs and the special mean- ing of their massiveness were not then known, and we can pardon the insult offered to the Great Pyramid, in the calcula- tion, made at Mr. Senior's request, of what it would cost to erect it at the present day. The calculation, however, is surely incorrect. To quarry, convey, dress, and place seven million tons of stone would entail an expenditure of much more than a million, whieh would only be about three shillings per ton. London Bridge and Waterloo Bridge cost nearly three millions, and together do not contain anything like the amount of material accumulated in the monument of Cheops. A common error, found in all the guide-books and met with in those volumes, ought to be refuted. It is, that Lake Mareotis was formed, or greatly enlarged, when the English in 1801 cut the natural dyke at Aboukir, and let in the sea-water, devastating, according to Baedeker, a hundred thousand acres of good land, and destroy- ing 150 villages. An examination of the locality shows the utter impossibility of this ; neither is there any evidence whatever of the existence of the 150 villages. The fact is that the lake is some eight feet below the level of the sea, and its waters are constantly replenished from the Nile, the overflow of which, conducted through numerous canals, filters through the porous soil, to accumulate in low situations. In former times, the ater of the Nile was not brought so near, and the level of the lake was therefore lower than it now is. The water let in by the English has long since evaporated. Nearly all the Delta lagoons owe their existence to Nile water finding its way at the period of inundation to the broad depressions forming their beds, and the brackishness is due to the salt which saturates the porous subsoil through which the water percolates.

The distinguishing quality of Mr. Senior's mind, that " luci- dity " which, according to Mr. Matthew Arnold, Englishmen so commonly lack, is as abundantly displayed in these as in his former volumes. He was a keen rather than a profound observer ; accurate, without being dry ; earnest, yet free from any taint of priggishness. Ho had the art, possessed by so few, of at once enlisting the sympathy of his interlocutor, and his questions are often as instructive as the answers he elicited were interesting. The conversations in Malta are less attrac- tive than those in Egypt, and the account of his trip up the Nile is valuable chiefly as a record of the impressions made upon such a mind as his by such a voyage. But the reader may be assured that there is not a page of dull or profitless reading in these volumes, of the contents of which we have not attempted to do more than indicate the wealth and variety.