The Birth of Modern Egypt 41
AH asked for a glass of water, but said nothing. He was
never a man of words.1
French, British, Turks, and Mamelukes had thus all
been cleared out of Egypt, and there remained only one
alien authority there—Mehemet Ali's own Albanians.
And we shall see how these in their turn were got rid of
as soon as he was able to supply their place with native
Egyptian and Sudanese regiments. Not the least
service of Mehemet AH to Egypt is that he rid it so
swiftly and so cheaply of other foreign adventurers who
had fastened on it. But though these foreigners no
longer existed as distinct castes, though the Turkish
Pasha, the Georgian Mameluke, the Circassian bravo,
and the Albanian bashi-bozouk were no longer rival ruling
classes, the remnants of them remained and coalesced
into a new ruling class. Hereafter, in Egyptian politics,
we find the country being ruled by an Oriental autocrat,
helped or hindered by an Oriental aristocracy that we call
for convenience "Turks/5 recruited from a middle-class
of Armenians, Jews, and Copts. It will be found to be
a good guide to the character of later Egyptian states-
men if we can find to which of these races each one
belongs—remembering that Georgians are generally
called Circassians, though they are their opposite in
character and capacity.
Mehemet Ali is generally credited with having
Europeanised Egypt. He certainly exploited European
experience, in so far as he could understand it, to
strengthen his position. But he remained an Asiatic
autocrat, and his system of government was Oriental, with
1 For contemporary accounts, see Gabarti, op. cit., vol. viiL., and
Galley Knight in Lane Poole's Life of Stratford Canning, vol. i,,
London, 1888. The story of a leap from the citadel wall, by,
mounted Mameluke, is a legend.