TURKISH SATRAPS IN ASIA AND EGYPT.*
Mn. Jortx BARKER, who had received a business training in the office of Mr. Thellusson, the "millionaire" banker, went to Con- stantinople apparently about the end of last century, where for a time he acted as secretary to the British Ambassador; Dlr. John Spencer Smith. Leaving his service, Mr. Barker proceeded to Aleppo, where he fixed his residence, and through the long period of thirty-three years he continued to act, either there or at Alexandria as the consular agent of the East India Company, and latterly of the Imperial Government. At Alexandria he was a good deal mixed up with the movements surrounding the attempts of Mehemet All to carve a new kingdom for himself out of the decayed limbs of the Ottoman Em- pire. After his retirement, Mr. Barker continued to reside mostly in the East, and died at his residence in the northern Levant in the autumn of 1818. Mr. Barker was thus about half a century in the East, living in constant intercourse with all sorts of people,—Pashas, Arabs, Druses, Copts, Armenians, Jews, and Europeans. His business led him continually to all manner of places, and mixed him up intimately in many of the stirring events of the time. He carries us back to the days when the strangely insatiable genius of Napoleon Bonaparte led him to seek dominion in Egypt and Asia, to the time of the Greek War of Independence, and the Russian war of 1829. He makes us familiar with the fact that rebel pashas are for ever causing havoc in one portion or another of Syria, devastating a country where mighty empires once had their seat. A book written from materials gathered in such a life ought to be most interesting and valuable. And interesting to a certain extent it undoubtedly is, but of independent historic value it has little or none. The com- piler, Mr. Edward Barker, whose own experiences, of course, cover the last three out of the five Sultans, has obviously had no notion of how to use his materials, and often appears more intent upon making it clear that his father enjoyed the confidence and esteem of titled personages, ambassadors, generals and admirals, princes and pashas, than on letting us see into the life of a strange community with his father's eyes. We get all manner of irrelevant matters thus mixed up together, stumbling on the " Andrassy Note" almost at the beginning of the book, and are continually pulled up by the necessity of discriminating which is the father's opinion regarding things long ago, and the son's about last week's newspaper article or the latest phase of the Turkish muddle. The book in parts would almost lead one to say that its only raison d'être was to be found in the new interest which Turkey has lately caused in England, and that it was published mainly in order to enable Mr. Edward Barker to express certain rather indistinct and sometimes
• Syria and Egypt under the Last Five Sultansof Turkey. Being Experiences durfn_g Fifty Years of Mr. Consul-General Barker. Edited by his Bon, Edward B. B. Barker. London: S. Tinsley.
contradictory opinions about Turkish affairs. We really believe, however, that this unsatisfactory impression is caused more by the compiler's inexperience than anything else. He is anxious to have his say on the Eastern Question, no doubt, but also he has not digested his materials, and does not see the proportionate values of them, so that we get an odd jumble, instead of a con- nected narrative. A full third of the first volume is, for example, taken up with letters from and to that eccentric wanderer and misanthrope, Lady Hester Stanhope, hardly a line of which is of the least value towards helping the reader to understand the East. The fact is, however, that the title of the book is itself also an injudicious misnomer. Syria and Egypt under the Last Five Sultans raises great expectations, which when unfulfilled are liable to induce disappointment in the mind of the reader. Had Mr. Barker called these memorials of his father's day and his own by some more modest title, it is quite likely that we might have refrained in a great measure from this grumble.
For there is, after all, a considerable amount of amusement, and something of value, in these two volumes ; and they are printed in such beautiful, large.type, that when one goes to them for amusement, instead of serious instruction, one finds not a little worth reading. At the very opening of the book, we get a story of the reception of an English envoy by the first Sultan of the five—Sultan Selim—which presents us with a most startling contrast to the way these things are done now-a-days. The Giaour, the Infidel envoy, was treated in those days much like a criminal. Compelled to wait any number of hours outside the tumble-down palace of his " Sublimity " the Padishah, he was at -length, after drinking coffee in an ante-room, badly furnished— it was before the merry days of English loans—dragged into the Presence between two guards, his retinue and himself divested of their swords, and fur pelisses—although it was in the middle of summer—flung indiscriminately on their shoulders. In the presence chamber the ambassador and his suite halted about twenty paces from the seat of the drowsy Sovereign, who, after a time, sleepily turned his head and asked the Grand Vizier who this Infidel was. Being answered that he was a "slave of the King of England sent to solicit his favour, and to lay a letter at the foot of the throne," the monarch again, after a time, asked "if they had fed the dog and clothed him,'. and on getting an answer in the affirmative, said, "Very well, be it so," and that was all that passed, except that during the audience two colossal negroes stood by the throne, calling out, "Turn them out," "Turn them out," and making hideous faces at the party. Contrast this picture with the one given the other day of General Ignatieff's contemptuous treatment of the present Sultan, and one gets reminded of the " development " which Turkey has undergone in three-quarters of a century.
Much curious information may be picked up here and there through the book about Turkish-pasha government or no- government ; we can only find space for a story or two, first premisingthat the more one looks at Turkish history, the more one wonders that Englishmen should have needed Bulgarian massacres to convince them that if there was justice in the universe vengeance must one day overtake the Turkish oppressor. Speaking of the year 1800, for instance, Mr. Barker says, "In those days, putting a wealthy man to death and seizing all his property was an every-day occurrence ?" What, we wonder, has it ever been before or since ? Had the wide domains camped upon by the Turks not been some of the fairest and most fertile in the world, had the races they sub- dued not been endowed with every gift almost save military skill and courage, the Turkish Empire must have been a waste long ago. It was this oppression, says Mr. Barker the younger, and not religious fanaticism, which lay at the root of all the petty rebellions which have been chronic in Turkey for cen- turies, but what is that to the purpose? The fanaticism caused the oppression in the first instance, which was not so much in the blood as in the creed. There were grotesque aspects of the endless bickering and butchery sometimes though, and we prefer at present to recount some of these,—as, for instance, the odd indifference to anarchy which prevailed when rival parties carried on a sort of war in Aleppo—the Janissaries and the Shereefs—for control of the city, or rather of the plunder. Much shooting characterised this "eight years" war, and very little murder, so that the people took the powder-burning among their amusements. One day, we are told, the firing began earlier than usual, and the people on the terraces of the houses cried to those below, with a certain dry humour of indifference,—" Yahoo, hallo there ! What a hurry you are in, won't you let us drink a cup of coffee befere we begin ?" It was not, we learn,
uncommon for a few daring spirits in those days to lay hold of a fort or a town and put it and the neighbour- hood under contribution, and sometimes the Turkish Governor would thus be so completely in the power of factions in his Pashalic that he would be dependent on private friendship or even on Consular assistance for his living. This seems to have been for a considerable time the case with Aleppo, but there came a Pasha to the town, called Jelall ii Deen, or Pchapan Oglou ("a Son of the Shepherd "), who turned the tables on the factions there, and in a small way enacted the tragedy of Sultan Mahmoud over again. The JaniSsary party was the strongest in the place at the time, and Jelall determined to put them down, but for a time dissembled, in true Oriental style, till they should be thrown off their guard. When he had succeeded in making the people believe that there was no harm in him, he invited twenty of the chiefs of the faction to a banquet, and slew them all, along with their attendants. This same Pasha was quite a model Turkish tyrant in his way. On his first arrival, he walked through the streets of Aleppo incognito, accompanied by an executioner, "with the express, deliberate design of cutting off the heads of a few wretched shopkeepers, as a thing of course, which is always done by Pashas, to show and establish their authority in a new government." He seized five innocent people, and had them killed on the spot. On another occasion he put two innocent men to death, merely as an adver- tisement to the inhabitants that he was "all there," he having had the usual Turkish dread of a poiulax insurrection. The business of such men is to rob and oppress, and they do their work as impartially as they can on the Christians ; com- mitting frauds also on the central Government with as much pleasure and often as much impunity as upon unfor- tunate traders and workpeople. No wonder that all beneath them be vile, and more or less given to roguery and deceit. Cun- ning is the only weapon left to the down-trodden. Theft would seem to be viewed as a fine art, indeed, by certain tribes in Syria, and Mr. Barker tells a good story of a Greek Christian pedlar who went hawking Manchester goods amongst some Turkomans. Perceiving a lad of the tribe surreptitiously abstract a piece of chintz print, the pedlar rose to go after him and recover his pro- perty, but the boy's father prevented him, saying, "Sit down, I will pay you the value. It is my son's first attempt, and I would be sorry that he should receive a check." There are many other good stories of this kind in these volumes, but we can only find room for the following, which serves to show that, oppressor though he be, the Turk does not always get the best of it :— " An amusing story is told of a Kadee at Latakia. One Deeb Naomi, a Christian, had a law-suit, and having gained his cause, urged the Kadee to give him the document legalising his claim, and putting him in possession of the disputed land. But the Kadee, as usual, wished to prolong the delivery, in order to weary the patience of, the postulant, and induce him to give more fee-money than he (the Kadee) was entitled to. Deeb Naomi was tired of coming every day to ask for his paper, but was resolved not to pay more than usual. He therefore, to bring about this result, bethought him of a plan. He made up a large bundle, and carried it under his cloak, and going to the house of one of the Kadee's wives, knocked at the door. A black female slave came to the door, and half opening it, asked what he wanted. Deeb Naomi asked in his turn if this was the Kadee's house. 'Yes,' was the answer.
Then,' said he, am commissioned by the Kadee to deliver here a loaf of sugar, some coffee, and sweetmeats, because the Kadee has heard good news, and intonds to spend the evening in the harem gaily. But wait, I am afraid I have made a blunder. Is this the house of the first wife, or of the second wife?'—' Of the first wife.'—' Oh!' said he, as if suddenly startled, what a mistake I have made! don't upbraid me, I am so sorry.' He then went to the house of the other wife, and acted the same scene over again. In both cases the two wives over- heard what he had said, for the door was ajar ; and this he intended they should. After sunset the Kadee came to the house of the second wife, and knocked at the door, but he could not get admittance. At last, after knocking several times, the lady cried out from the court- yard, 'Go to the house of your favourite, and make merry ; I am not worthy of the good things,—the sweetmeats and coffee. You are not wanted here.' Not able to get in (for in Turkey tbere are no latch- keys), he went to the house of his first wife, and knocked at the door. The same reception awaited him there, with much additional recrimi- nations: that a young wife was a treasure ; that it was only in her society he could be gay ; he had better go there. Finding it useless to remonstrate with the lady in her present mood, which he had learnt by long experience boded no good, and not willing to be left out in the cold, he went to a friend's house and begged for a night's lodging. His friend and he talked the matter over, and from the words which had fallen, suspected that some trick had been played on him ; and then it struck him that it 'could be no other than that rascal of a Christian.'" The next day he went to a neighbour whose house was next to his, and by means of a ladder got over the wall, and into the courtyard of the second wife's habitation, but no protestations of his could persuade her of his innocence. The same thing occurred when he afterwards went to the first wife's apartments. The presents of coffee, sugar, &c., be- came an Oriental apple of discord, and it was some time before he heard the end of the matter. A few days afterwards, Deeb Naomi, when he thought the Kadee's wrath was somewhat abated, went to the Court of Law, and asked for his paper. The Kadee, glad to get rid of him, and fearing a worse trick, ordered the document to be given to him, and told him never to show his face there again.
The greater part of the second volume is taken up with events
snore or less closely connected with the Court of Mehemet Ali, and with his schemes of conquest and independence. Mr. Barker, Senior, gives in the letters, memoranda, and official papers collected by his son an interesting and often amusing account of this great Turkish Pasha, — a man of no mean energy and abilities, and fully endowed with the gift of finding the means to carry out his large designs. Like his descendant, Ismael, he was a keen trader, as well as an ambitious prince and warrior, and the history of how he managed to screw long prices out of the merchants for his cotton is quite worthy to rank alongside the best exploits of the present Viceroy. His bankruptcy was also often predicted, and yet he found the means to pull through. Of the two, we should say he was the more prudent and practical man, and had European jealousies let him alone, he would no doubt have wrested Syria, at least, from the Porte. Ibrahim Pasha, Mehemet's son, is less familiarly presented
to us, but he, too, seems to have been a man of energy and a con- siderable soldier, and had evidently a great esteem for Mr. Barker and his family. It appears that his rank as a pasha was higher than that of his father, but his pride was not greater. "I never-had a master," said Mehemet All proudly, to Mr. Barker, when re- counting to him some -of the steps by which he had risen from an Albanian villager to be lord of Egypt, on the occasion of their first interview together. Besides the politics and schemes of Mehemet Ali, we get glimpses of the cross-purposes and intrigues of the Courts of Europe, which, if containing nothing new, are at least interesting in away just now, particularly the signs of English
blow-hot-and-cold diplomacy, and help to make, on the whole, a fairly readable book. Reduced to one-half, or filled with material of a quality more uniform with the best, it would have been more readable. The best feature is, after all, the anecdotes, but the insight we get into Mr. Barker's private character and mode of life is also not unpleasant. He appears to have been a firm-handed, upright English gentleman, who interested himself intelligently in all the public affairs of his time, and who also did what he -could to ameliorate the condition of those around him. We will close this notice with one more story. It is of a Sultan who .commanded a schoolmaster to teach an ass to read, on pain of death :—
"The poor wretch, seeing the bowstring before his eyes, said to the Sultan, I do not despair of doing what you command, for all your Majesty's orders must be obeyed; but as children require a year to learn, and a man grown up two years, a donkey would certainly require three years.' This the Sultan found reasonable, and granted. On going home, his wife said to the schoolmaster, How can you be such a goose as to expect to escape? the time must come when you will be put to -death!' 'No,' said he, 'I have three chances,—either that the Sultan should die, or the donkey should die, or that I should die myself.'"
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