64 Egypt
barracks in the desert where he could bury himself
among his Mameluke bodyguards.
The first act of Abbas on accession was to sweep out
all the advisers, native and foreign, of his father and
grandfather. Many were certainly not worth much, but
they were indispensable to the working of the adminis-
trative machine and the State monopolies. Hitherto the
confusion between the Privy purse and the public
Treasury had not much mattered. But Abbas replaced
the cash in the Treasury by credit notes of his own, which
then were put in circulation and came back in payment
of taxes. He then suppressed all the schools and most of
the other public institutions of European character. He
surrounded himself with Albanian and Mameluke guards,
destroyed the national and Egyptian character of the
army, and reduced it to a few thousand men. Having
thus dangerously deteriorated the native and national
foundations of the State, he still more gravely imperilled
its independence by excessive subservience to the Sultan.
' * If I must be governed by someone, let it be by the Khalif
rather than by the consuls/' said he. But, as a matter
of fact, both Khalif and consuls got all they wanted out
of him. The Porte forced on him the <{ Tanzimat " that
the British had forced on Turkey. This involved, pro-
fessedly only, acceptance of the abolition both of the
kurbash and of the corvee. Practically, it involved an
admission of the right both of Turks and of British to
interfere in the administration of Egypt. Thereafter, in
virtue of the Anglo-Turkish Treaty of 1838, foreign
traders could buy produce direct from the peasantry;
and the commercial monopoly of Mehernet Ali, though
it survived some time after, had no longer any real
substance* Further, the British got a footing in control
of the overland route that Mehemet AH never would have