‘What should I be without my debts?’ he would sometimes exclaim; ‘dear companions of my life that never desert me! All my knowledge of human nature is owing to them: it is in managing my affairs that I have sounded the depths of the human heart, recognised all the combinations of human character, developed my own powers, and mastered the resources of others. What expedient in negotiation is unknown to me? What degree of endurance have I not calculated? What play of the countenance have I not observed? Yes, among my creditors, I have disciplined that diplomatic ability that shall some day confound and control cabinets. O, my debts, I feel your presence like that of guardian angels! If I be lazy, you prick me to action; if elate, you subdue me to reflection; and thus it is that you alone can secure that continuous yet controlled energy which conquers mankind.’ Notwithstanding all this, Fakredeen had grown sometimes a little wearied even of the choice excitement of pecuniary embarrassment. It was too often the same story, the adventures monotonous, the characters identical. He had been plundered by every usurer in the Levant, and in turn had taken them in. He sometimes delighted his imagination by the idea of making them disgorge; that is to say, when he had established that supremacy which he had resolved sooner or later to attain. Although he never kept an account, his memory was so faithful that he knew exactly the amount of which he had been defrauded by every individual with whom he had had transactions. He longed to mulct them, to the service of the State, in the exact amount if their unhallowed appropriations. He was too good a statesman ever to confiscate; he confined himself to taxation. Confiscation is a blunder that destroys public credit: taxation, on the contrary, improves it, and both come to the same thing.