However, the officials of the day benefit by the _bahkshish_ that the Kurds pay them. And here we touch the real root of the matter. The Turk is not deliberately aiming at the extirpation of his Christian subjects. He has no deeper policy in his mind than just to go on _eskissi gibi_, "in the same old way," and let the officials fill their pockets in peace. As a man he has many virtues; and there never was an Englishman yet who dealt with him, and did not come to like him: but as a governor he is execrable; in that he is too lazy to see that things go well, and allows an unspeakably corrupt Civil Service to ruin the land as it likes. Will he ever do the one thing that can save him, and allow himself to be administered by some European Power, as Egypt has been? Perhaps a quotation from "Odysseus," shrewdest of European observers of Turkey, can give the answer. "'This country is just one big dish of soup,' said the _Vali_, 'and nobody has any real use for soup except to eat it. We eat in the old-fashioned way, with big spoons; you want to come along with gimlets and bore holes in the bottom of it, and suck. Then you propose that eating with spoons shall be abolished as old fashioned, because you know that we have no gimlets, and don't understand sucking.'"[103] A level plain like Gawar, with a Government headquarters and garrison at its town of Diza, ought to be as easily controlled a _kaimakamlik_ as one could wish. And so it is normally; though an Albanian _kaimakam_, Haidar Beg, did rouse rather a storm when he put a recalcitrant Kurdish chief on a donkey, face to the tail, and rode him in that fashion all round Diza town. Still he had the place in order; "Not a dog barked without leave when Haidar ruled," is the local saying to this day. Some time after his departure, however, the district was the scene of one of the very few attacks on a British Consul that have taken place in the land. Lawless as the country is, the foreign resident is generally safe; because such trouble follows for everybody if he is interfered with. In twelve years, the writer has only known five deliberate attacks on Europeans (though plenty were planned and did not come off); and only one of the five had fatal consequences,--at least to the European. Three of these attacks were on British Consuls--"for the fellows will go wandering into such dangerous places, just to make maps," as a harassed Ottoman official explained.