Well, there were plenty of people to succeed him. The pasha had a large family of children and grandchildren, to whom he had behaved sometimes with indulgence, but generally with unreasoning and perverse severity. There was scarcely a member of his family with whom he had not had many little quarrels, and who did not avoid his presence as they did the plague. Even the favorite Ibrahim could not bear to live in the same city as his presumed father; and the rest would have been little less startled by the last summons of all, than they were by an occasional order to appear in the presence of the angry and savage old man. One feeling, however, was pretty general amongst them,--they regarded the pasha as a wonderfully important personage, and themselves consequently, being his children, as little less wonderful and important. Their hopes were in the uncertainty of life; and very many of them, in their own minds, had arranged what they would do in case they came to be viceroy--how they would make the money spin, and what mighty devices they would put in practice, to emulate and surpass the splendors of "Effendina"--"Our Lord," _par excellence_. It must be confessed that Abbas Pasha alone had the good sense to take up a position of his own. Whether he was as crafty and politic as some pretend before his elevation to power, it is difficult to decide; but the plan, at that time generally ascribed to him, of forming what was called a Turkish or bigoted party--a party of discontented great folks, and fanatical Ulemas--a party which should appeal to the religious prejudices of the good Caireens, and oppose itself to the inroad of European adventurers and improvements,--this plan, if distinctly formed, was certainly a very sagacious one. Let us be frank: Europeans have done more harm than good in Egypt; that is to say, whenever they have appeared, except as mere commercial men, bringing the goods of their own countries, and anxious to take away the surplus of the luxuriant crops of the valley of the Nile. As political advisers, partly, perhaps, because men undertook to advise who were fit only for the counting-house, partly because their own interests were concerned, their intermeddling has been most pernicious. Even the benefits, for some such there are, which have been conferred by their wisdom, have been mingled with an immense amount of misery. There is one fact which has attained an almost mythological dignity, from its notoriety, and the admirable manner in which it symbolises European meddling in Egypt. An English merchant, who ought to have known the manners of the country, advised the construction of the Mahmoudiyeh Canal. It has been most useful to commerce; but twenty thousand people were starved or worked to death within six weeks, in order to complete it. Fifty illustrations of the same kind might be given; but we wish merely to have our meaning understood, when we say that, if Abbas Pasha or his party ever