they wish to grow corn they must pay for permission to do so,
pay for liberty to take water from the broad Nile, and pay for
liberty to sell the corn. If the crop is good, pay double taxes
(one for private purse of the Pasha and one for the Government at
Cairo). If they don't grow the corn they can't pay the taxes at
all, and get kourbashed (flogged) and put into prison. No matter
how they make a few piastres, the dragoman of some Bey or Pasha
will steal it for his master. They frequently pull down huts and
tear up yards and fields to find where the coins are hidden. If the
peasant buys a few rags for his wife or child, or mends a hole in
his hut to keep out the sun, he is told he must have got money
somewhere, and he is doubly taxed; and after all, his sole
possessions are a hut made of mud and river reeds, a rush bed, a
rush mat, and an earthen pot."

In still another letter he says:--

"Some of these merchants, who sit all day in their little stalls in
the bazaar, are really millionaires, and would buy up many of the
London merchant-princes. They live like kings in what, outside,
looks like a mud hut. If one shows any outward signs of wealth, the
Pasha lets him know quietly that he will at once be charged as a
rebel or something, and put in prison if he does not make him a
little present, generally from L300 to L1000. One Pasha left here
last year, admitting, report says, that in three years he had made
L60,000. He came here three years ago as a clerk on L2 a month.
Abdul-Kereem Pasha, the Governor, took a fancy to him, and made him
chief of the tax-gatherers; in three years he gained the rank of
Pasha and L60,000--meaning 5000 ruined homes, several million
strokes of the bastinado, rapine, robbery, and men driven to
exasperation, and shot down at their doors."

Need we wonder that people so ground down by tyranny were delighted to
hear their Governor-General announce that he would hold the balance
level, and that no longer should the rich and powerful trample on the
weak and poor?

The prominent characteristic of the Egyptian rule in the Soudan was
fittingly summed up in the sentence, "_Kourbash, kourbash, et toujours
kourbash_," which being interpreted means, "Flogging, flogging, always
flogging." As to administration of justice, there was no such thing. He
who could bribe the judges the highest got judg