whole villages were depopulated.
Meantime the uttermost farthing was wrung from the wretched fellahin,
while they were forced to the building of magnificent public works by
unpaid labour. In 1844-1845 there was some improvement in the condition
of the country as a result of financial reforms the pasha was compelled
to execute. Mehemet Ali, who had been granted the honorary rank of grand
vizier in 1842, paid a visit to Stamboul in 1846, where he became
reconciled to his old enemy Khosrev Pasha, whom he had not seen since he
spared his life at Cairo in 1803. In 1847 Mehemet Ali laid the
foundation stone of the great barrage across the Nile at the beginning
of the Delta. He was barely persuaded from ordering the barrage to be
built with stone from the pyramids! Towards the end of 1847 the aged
pasha's mind began to give way, and by the following June he was no
longer capable of administering the government. In September 1848
Ibrahim was acknowledged by the Porte as ruler of the pashalik, but he
died in the November following. Mehemet Ali survived another eight
months, dying on the 2nd of August 1849, aged eighty. He had done a
great work in Egypt; the most permanent being the weakening of the tie
binding the country to Turkey, the starting of the great cotton
industry, the recognition of the advantages of European science, and the
conquest of the Sudan. (F. R. C.)

Abbas I. and Said Pasha.

(2) _From the Death of Mehemet Ali to the British Occupation._--On
Ibrahim's death in November 1848 the government of Egypt fell to his
nephew Abbas I (q.v.), the son of Tusun. Abbas put an end to the system
of commercial monopolies, and during his reign the railway from
Alexandria to Cairo was begun at the instigation of the British
government. Opposed to European ways, Abbas lived in great seclusion,
and after a reign of less than six years he was murdered (July 1854) by
two of his slaves. He was succeeded by his uncle Said Pasha, the
favourite son of Mehemet Ali, who lacked the strength of mind or
physical health needed to execute the beneficent projects which he
conceived. His endeavour, for instance, to put a stop to the slave
raiding which devastated the Sudan provinces was wholly ineffectual. He
had a genuine regard for the welfare of the fellahin, and a land law of
1858 secured to them an acknowledgment of freehold as against the crown.
The pasha was much under French influence, and in 1856 was induced to
grant to Fer