It is not only in cases where an Administration, which is a soulless. abstraction, is concerned, that such things happen. The same thing occurs, but on a smaller scale, on the estates of all great proprietors who are non-resident, and even the resident do not escape altogether.

The practice springs out of the nature of things Eastern. Since, and long before, the time when the unjust steward settled accounts with his lord's debtors on the basis of twenty per cent. discount, the habit of plunder has been ingrained in the people. It is the perpetual revenge of the poorer children of Ishmael against those who are richer than themselves, and who are too much otherwise occupied to be their own bailiffs. This habit is more especially ingrained in the Egyptian. In the Turk, the Circassian, and the Albanian, it is much less pronounced, and there are many cases where it does not exist at all in them. Whether it be the pride of caste, or whether it be an original contempt for indirect thieving, it were hard to say; but it is as certain that peculation is less common among such men than among those of Arab origin, as it is certain that they are tenfold better directors and producers of work. They will not work themselves, but they will take very considerable trouble to see that other people work, and a 'teftich' on which a Turk or a Circassian is moufettich, and where there are overseers of those nationalities, is invariably better managed and better cared for than where the Arab rules. And this is not due to the exercise of violence on their part, but rather to that electrical quality of command which they exercise implicitly and without effort. For the matter of violence, it is probably too much to say that none is used, although the 'korbagh' is strictly forbidden, and there is reason to believe that the cruel use of it has ceased. But that it is disused entirely is as doubtful as the supposition that a naval officer never employs an oath because forbidden to do so by the Queen's Regulations, or that civilians on shore refrain from occasional expletives because the offence is punishable under a statute of Charles the Second.

A friend of the writer was on a journey of inspection at a time when the district was seriously threatened with drought. He left his encampment one morning early to continue his road, and, after riding a couple of miles near the canal, found the field he was riding over saturated with water. Closer examination showed that a considerable quantity of naked ground not in cultivation had been thus watered. What could it mean? He turned for information to the 'moufettich,' or bailiff, who rode behind him, pointing out to him how wrong it was in such a time of scarcity thus to waste the water. The inspector rode on, and in a few minutes heard the lusty cries of some one in distress. Looking round, he saw an Arab lying flat on the ground, face downwards, one man holding his head, two more holding his feet, while a fourth man with one of the saïs sticks was administering a quick succession of blows upon the fallen man's body. Finding that

the man in question was the watchman who was paid specially to watch the water, and that instead of doing his duty he had quitted his post and gone to sleep in his village, remarking too that the blows were falling on a part of the man's body where he would feel but not be injured by the punishment, the inspector did not interfere. He probably reflected that perhaps at that very moment the same sort of punishment was being given for a less offence on board one of Her Majesty's ships, and that in the case before him the delinquent was getting the only justice possible in the country.

This want of means of punishment for thefts and for small offences is one of the evils of the country, and one of the great discouragements of an administration. The bastinado has been put under a ban which no European probably wishes raised. But as yet nothing has been substituted for it, and people must either take the law into their own hands, or follow the advice of Dogberry and let the thief prove that he is one by 'stealing out of their company.' A nazir or foreman is leaving his work at sundown and sees three persons belonging to the farm carrying off five measures of beans which they have stolen. One of the culprits is nine years old, another is twelve, and the third-a man-excuses himself for stealing by saying that he has no work and is hungry. The place where this occurs is fourteen miles from the chief town of the province, where the Moudir, or governor, resides. The superintendent sees that if he wants to have justice from the constituted authority, he must detach two men as an escort to take the prisoners, losing the labour of the pair for two days; he knows that at the moudirieh it may be days before the case reaches the governor, that there will be cross swearing to a degree that will render a decision impossible, that he will have the trouble and expense of going with witnesses, and that after all it depends very much upon whether the accused have piastres enough to bribe some police clerk or janitor if they will ever be tried at all. The superintendent wants to punish and also to deter, at the least inconvenience to himself and cost to his employers; so he constitutes himself a judge, condemns the children to fifteen days' field work, the man to two months, at half the wage of the farm. At night he secures his prisoners in some safe place.

How is one to punish a man who steals a buffalo and duly chronicles the beast's death and burial in his official register, ignoring, unfortunately for him, the fact that the Commission have their private mark on the buffalo, and by means of it prove the animal's existence eight months after its imaginary interment? The establishment of good local courts for the trial of civil causes, and of justices of the peace for small delicts, would be work worthy of an Egyptian statesman of the first rank. The question is not so easy as at first sight it may seem to be, for the tribunals to be of use must be able to adjudicate for Moslem and Christians alike, and in aiming at this one

finds himself immediately in presence of the difficulty, which many good Moslem would waive were it not that it springs from the Kuran itself, the illegality of accepting the evidence of unbelievers to contradict the evidence of Moslem. To Nubar Pasha is due the honour of founding the existing international tribunals which corrected the injustice committed in foreign civil causes by the native and also by the consular courts. To Riaz Pasha is due the honour of sweeping away, with many other oppressions, the wholesale and savage use of the 'korbagh' and the bastinado. It would be a fitting crown to Shérif Pasha's attempts to rescue his country from disorder, if his Ministry could devise means, while curbing military and popular passion, to place ready and reasonable justice within the reach of the many peoples of many creeds who constitute the five millions of the population of Egypt.

FRANCIS W. ROWSELL.

SIR WALTER RALEGH IN IRELAND.

A FEW years ago a desultory correspondent wrote to a friend :

I have returned from the tropical seas where Ralegh's fleet suffered from tornados and fever, and I am resting for a few weeks in 'Sir Walter's study'-in the same room where he looked at the charts of Verazzano before his voyage, and where he first smoked tobacco in Europe on his return. The room is much the same as it might have been in those times. The original painting of the first governor of Virginia is there, and a contemporary engraving of Elizabeth Queen of Virginia. The long table at which he wrote, the oak chest in which he kept papers, the little Italian cabinet, the dark wainscoting with fine carvings rising up from each side of the hearthstone to the ceiling, the old deeds and parchments, some with Ralegh's seal, the original warrant, under the autograph and signet of Queen Elizabeth, granting a pension to the Countess Elinor of Desmond, and the confused litter of vellumbound and oak-bound books of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries-for there is nothing in the room (except the writer of these lines) that was not born when Ralegh lived here all these things compel me to think of him, and I do my best to think well of him, but how can I? Who could think well of him here? As I look through the deep window where he often stood, I see the ruined tower of St. Mary's and the remains of the College of Youghal. They were built a hundred years before his time, as well as the warden's house in which he lived, by the eighth Earl of Desmond. In this spot I cannot think of Ralegh without thinking of Thomas Fitzgerald-a contrast not favourable to Ralegh.

The great Earl, to whom the modern occupant of Sir Walter's study thus referred, was the chief personage in the Pale for some years. He was Lord Deputy, but whilst he did his duty conscientiously to the foreign lord of Ireland, he was not insensible to the fact that there were people in Ireland who lived beyond the Pale. He called the first Parliament in which a real effort was made to establish something like fair dealing with the Irishry. He encouraged the commerce with the southern parts of Europe which had sprung up about the time that Edward the Second had farmed out the customs revenue of Cork, Youghal, and Waterford to Gerardo, a Florentine merchant, and the Friscobaldi had begun to send their wines from Livorno to Youghal. Like his contemporary Lorenzo de' Medici, he played a part in the revival of letters. He could not restore all the ruined seats of learning from Armagh to Cashel and Lismore that had fallen before civil war and foreign invasion, but he founded a college at Youghal in 1464 and gave the warden and fellows an endowment of 600l. per annum-a more generous endowment, looking to his in

come and the value of money in those days, than the Parliament has given to the Queen's Colleges and the Irish people themselves have given to the Catholic University in our time. Some of the specimens of early printing-1479 to 1483-which were found fifty years ago in a recess in the house built by the great Earl for the Warden of the College, were no doubt a part of the library then collected. The contrast between this generous effort to revive the ancient civilisation of the country and the Philistine policy of later times is remarkable.

Ralegh's career in Ireland determined his fate more perhaps than is usually supposed. On the other hand, his proceedings and those of his companions in Munster made a deep mark in Irish history. In fact he was one of the most daring and active of those eminent Englishmen who have done much to render British government permanently difficult-if not more than difficult-in Ireland.

British historians have touched but slightly on Ralegh's Irish exploits. Beyond the fact of his planting the potato for the first time in his garden near the old town-wall of Youghal, his smoking tobacco under the four intertwisted yew trees that still remain there, and his musings with Edmund Spenser, little is published of his Munster life. And yet it is still a fresh and living force in the unwritten history of the peasants from Youghal to Lismore, and along the banks of the Blackwater and the Lee from Imokilly to the mountains of Kerry. It is possible to meet men and women on the old ploughlands of the Desmond estate who speak nothing but Irish (in the Province of Munster there are thirty thousand peasants who at this day do not speak English), and from their stories to pick up more of the real doings of Ralegh and his comrades in Ireland than from Hume and the historians. That tradition-loving and long-memoried people as M. Thierry calls them, the most unchanging people on the face of the globe as Mr. Froude calls them, are not ignorant of the events of three hundred years ago, and they look upon them now much in the same way that their ancestors looked upon them then.

In his English in Ireland Mr. Froude makes no reference to Sir Walter Ralegh, and in his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, in which the war of the Desmonds is more fully described, he mentions him but once. Having touched on the Irish victory at Glenmalure in which the new Deputy, Lord Grey de Wilton, was defeated, the landing of two thousand Scots in Antrim under the Countess of Desmond, and the landing of some Spanish and Italian allies of the Irish in Dingle Bay, Mr. Froude says:

Meanwhile, Lord Grey having recovered as well as he could from his first calamity, and being reassured by a victory of Maltby's over the Burkes and the unexpected quiet of the rest of Ireland, gathered all the soldiers that he could raise, and set off with a small, but, from its composition, unusually interesting force, to attack the invaders by land. Ireland had become to young Englishmen of spirit a land of hope and adventure, where they might win glory and perhaps VOL. X.-No. 57. Y Y