His Government,
However, Is Desirous, If Report Speaks Truth, Of Thrusting Al-Hijaz
Upon The Egyptian, Who On His Side Would Willingly Pay A Large Sum To
Avert Such Calamity.
The Holy Land drains off Turkish gold and blood in
abundance, and the
[P.258] lords of the country hold in it a contemptible position. If
they catch a thief, they dare not hang him. They must pay black-mail,
and yet be shot at in every pass. They affect superiority over the
Arabs, hate them, and are despised by them. Such in Al-Hijaz are the
effects of the charter of Gulkhanah, a panacea, like Holloway's Pills,
for all the evils to which Turkish, Arab, Syrian, Greek, Egyptian,
Persian, Armenian, Kurd, and Albanian flesh is heir to. Such the
results of the Tanzimat, the silliest copy of Europe's
folly-bureaucracy and centralisation-that the pen of empirical
statecraft ever traced.[FN#27] Under a strong-handed and strong-hearted
despotism, like Mohammed Ali's, Al-Hijaz, in one generation, might be
purged of its pests. By a proper use of the blood feud; by vigorously
supporting the weaker against the stronger classes; by regularly
defeating every Badawi who earns a name for himself; and, above all, by
the exercise of unsparing, unflinching justice,[FN#28] the few
thousands of half-naked bandits, who now make the land a fighting
field, would soon sink into utter insignificance.
[p.259] But to effect such end, the Turks require the old stratocracy,
which, bloody as it was, worked with far less misery than the charter
and the new code.
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