Hekekian Bey is my near neighbour, and he comes in and we fronder the Government.  His heart is sore with disinterested grief for the sufferings of the people.  ’Don’t they deserve to be decently governed, to be allowed a little happiness and prosperity?  They are so docile, so contented; are they not a good people?’ Those were his words as he was recounting some new iniquity.  Of course half these acts are done under pretext of improving and civilizing, and the Europeans applaud and say, ‘Oh, but nothing could be done without forced labour,’ and the poor Fellaheen are marched off in gangs like convicts, and their families starve, and (who’d have thought it) the population keeps diminishing.  No wonder the cry is, ‘Let the English Queen come and take us.’  You see, I don’t see things quite as Ross does, but mine is another standpunkt, and my heart is with the Arabs.  I care less about opening up the trade with the Soudan and all the new railways, and I should like to see person and property safe, which no one’s is here (Europeans, of course, excepted).  Ismail Pasha got the Sultan to allow him to take 90,000 feddans of uncultivated land for himself as private property, very well, but the late Viceroy Said granted eight years ago certain uncultivated lands to a good many Turks, his employes, in hopes of founding a landed aristocracy and inducing them to spend their capital in cultivation.  They did so, and now Ismail Pasha takes their improved land and gives them feddan for feddan of his new land, which will take five years to bring into cultivation, instead.  He forces them to sign a voluntary deed of exchange, or they go off to Fazogloo, a hot Siberia whence none return.  The Sultan also left a large sum of money for religious institutions and charities—­Muslim, Jew, and Christian.  None have received a foddah.  It is true the Sultan and his suite plundered the Pasha and the people here; but from all I hear the Sultan really wishes to do good.  What is wanted here is hands to till the ground, and wages are very high; food, of course, gets dearer, and the forced labour inflicts more suffering than before, and the population will decrease yet faster.  This appears to me to be a state of things in which it is no use to say that public works must be made at any cost.  The wealth will perhaps be increased, if meanwhile the people are not exterminated.  Then, every new Pasha builds a huge new palace while those of his predecessors fall to ruin.  Mehemet Ali’s sons even cut down the trees of his beautiful botanical garden and planted beans there; so money is constantly wasted more than if it were thrown into the Nile, for then the Fellaheen would not have to spend their time, so much wanted for agriculture, in building hideous barrack-like so-called palaces.  What chokes me is to hear English people talk of the stick being ‘the only way to manage Arabs’ as if anyone could doubt that it is the easiest way to manage any people where it can be used with impunity.