THE SECOND NUBAR PASHA MINISTRY. 363 should, except in the case of the army, be kept in the background, and should exercise their authority through native officials. I am convinced his ideal Government for Egypt, at the period of which I write, would have been similar to that of an Indian protected State, in which our Consul-General should have occupied the position of a Resident, while the Prime Minister of the Khedive should have directed and controlled the native administration. I should say, as the result of many conversations held with him on the subject, that his arguments in favour of this view were much as follows. Reforms, always unpopular in an Eastern country, are necessarily still more unpopular if they are introduced by foreigners, unfamiliar, for the most part, with the language, the usuages, the prejudices, and the ideas of the country to be reformed. He once remarked to me — • ** All your English system of criminal justice is based in the end upon the assumption that what mankind dreads most is death. It may be so with you ; it is not so with us. What the Oriental fears most is, not death, but interference with his habits and customs during his lifetime." He also argued that the Executive should be :onducted in the name and under the authority of the Khedive, and that the English officials should therefore appear as little as possible upon the stage, and :hat when they had to pull the wires, they should dways do it behind the scenes. To put the matter in a nutshell, his conception was that the native