The Egyptian Viceroy has answered the Sultan's letter of cen-
sure- by another expressing profound loyalty to his Sovereign, "explaining" suspicious circumstances, and offering to visit Con- stantinople, an offer in which we do not believe. He knows per- fectly well how often the air of Stamboul sows the seeds of illness in dangerous grandees. His explanation is a very lame affair. He retreated, he says, from the Cretan expedition because the cost was becoming unbearable, which was no more his business than it was the business of the Indian Viceroy to protest against the expensiveness of the Abyssinian War ; he is only buying iron- clads, and so on, to keep abreast of the age, which is exactly what his Sovereign does not want him to do ; and as to inviting Sovereigns, he invited them to the Sultan's dominions to see a work belonging to the Sultan. "I asked him to dinner at the Castle," says the butler at Windsor, "to see her Majesty's plate, and taste her Majesty's wine, and how could that be an improper proceeding ?" Nevertheless, the Viceroy yields, and his master has written to him to say that he must submit a quarterly budget,—which is impossible ; and abstain from laying on more taxes,—which, considering that the Fellahs have barely their skins left already, is easy, but useless. Egypt is neither more nor less than a great slave estate worked by a Turkish overseer, partly for his own benefit, partly for his master's, but mainly for that of a gang of scoundrels who are welcomed by him as intelli- gent foreign visitors, and who are really tallymen on a grand scale.
