Bankrupts and Brokers 89
eluding the Khedive from their councils. In this they got
useful support from Nubar, the Armenian, who had en-
couraged both Abbas in his reactionary excesses and
Ismail in his reckless extravagance. £CAn Armenian
Vizier and ruin is near,J' says the Turkish proverb. In the
eyes of Egypt, Nubar was as much a foreigner as Wilson,
and a Wilson or a de Blignieres were no different from
the foreign vermin who had been battening on Egypt.
To the Egyptian, these controllers and commissioners
were just king vultures that had settled on the carcass
after the concession hunters and such like carrion crows
had picked out the eyes.
It is surprising that the sufferings of the Egyptian
peasantry did not cause a rising against their oppressors,
European and Egyptian. The Europeans drew their high
salaries and lived in their extra-territorial and tax-
exempted communities. The " Turkish" upper class
collected their rents, and were almost as tax-exempt.
The Khedive smuggled revenues past the Control to an
amount estimated in 1878 at two millions. But it all had
to be got out of the fellaheen, who were ground to the
dust. Of the nine millions flogged out of them in 1878,
seven went to the foreign creditors. What the fellah paid
was limited only by what he possessed. The Omdeh went
round, kurbash in hand, in company with the Greek
usurer. As the fellah never had cash his sticks of furni-
ture, his stores of seed-corn, even his clothes were taken.
Such coin as came in at this time was from women's
ornaments.
The British officials were honest enough to see, and
bold enough to say, that in the interest of the population
both repudiation and reconstruction were essential. The
process of killing the goose that laid golden eggs by
plucking it alive offended them as both barbarous and un-