Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt. Blunt Wilfrid Scawen

in any but the most absolute forms of government, and he carried on the administration while in power according to the received methods which had prevailed in Ismaïl's time, by espionage, police rule, arrests, and deportations. But he was neither unjust nor personally cruel, and he was certainly animated throughout his public career by a real sense of patriotism. His idea in taking office under the joint control of the English and French Consulates, and the assistance he gave them in opposition to the popular will, was, as he has since assured me, simply to recover Egypt from its financial misfortunes and redeem the debt and so get rid as speedily as possible of the foreign intervention, nor is there any doubt that in the first year of his being in office great progress had been made in relieving the fellahin from their financial burdens. But the process of redemption must in any case have been a very slow one, and there is no probability that he would have succeeded either in freeing Egypt from the tutelage imposed on it or even of seeing the grosser evils of the administration which still weighed upon the people sensibly relieved. The régime of the Joint Control which Riaz served looked solely to finance and troubled itself hardly at all about other matters. The fellahin were still governed mainly by the kurbash, the courts of justice were abominably corrupt, the landed classes were universally in debt and were losing their lands to their creditors, and the alien caste of Turks and Circassians still lorded it over the whole country. There was no sign during the period of anything in the shape of moral improvement encouraged by the Government or even of improvement in the administrative system. This was the weak side of the Anglo-French régime and the cause of its failure to win popular favour. Nevertheless, it may be questioned whether the crisis would have come as speedily as it did, but for the Khedive's own insincerities and intrigues against his Minister. It was his character, as I have explained, to yield outwardly to pressure but at the same time to seek to regain his end by other means. Thus it happened that he had hardly taken Riaz to his counsels before he began to intrigue against him. He was jealous of his authority and grudged the power that he had given to his too independent Minister. This is the true history of the series of crises through which Egypt passed in 1881, including, to a large extent, the military troubles which ended in Riaz' fall from power.