8o Egypt
of the trade by driving it into secret and circuitous
channels.
It was Egypt that now gave a lead to the East in
this suppression of the slave trade. Slavery had been
abolished as a legal institution by Said. Ismail now
signed a series of international conventions against the
slave trade (Conventions with Great Britain, August 4
and September 7, 1877, and Decrees of August 4, 1877,
and January i, 1878). And it was no small matter for an
Islamic autocrat to decree that a fundamental principle
of Islam and one of its main forms of property was
illegal, and to join with Christian States for suppress-
ing it internationally. But Ismail went further than
decrees, and did succeed in striking a real blow at the
root of the evil at great risk to his own power. For the
slave trade was of more importance to Egypt than to
any other Eastern State. The Nile and the Red Sea
were the natural channels by which the slaves of Central
Africa reached Asia Minor and Arabia. Some fifty
thousand slaves, the survivors of probably four times
that number wasted in collection and transport, passed
annually along that via dolorosa, and of these some ten
thousand at most survived mutilation and the miseries
of being marketed to enter a comparatively happy life
in the,households of the Near East. Which traffic was
not only a source of much private profit to Egypt, but
was a part of the whole structure of public and private
property. If Egypt wanted recruits or revenue either
could be got by a slave raid in the Sudan, The Sudanese
Pashas were paid, or rather paid themselves in slaves,
The slave dealers (djeUahs) and their mercenaries were
the real government of the Sudan. In 1864 the Governor
of Kassala was besieged for two months by slavers.
Slave traders had the Pashas of Egypt in their pay,