The famine, cholera, and typhus continued their ravages far into 1868, and the Bey and the Beylical Government were alike on the verge of bankruptcy. Mr. Wood hurried back to Tunis to endeavour to prevent the apparently inevitable collapse. In addition to the two foreign loans of 1863 and 1865, the Bey had created an internal debt with various European merchants by a series of operations called “conversions.” These loans and the usurious interest paid upon them were by no means the only cause of the national insolvency. The insurrection had involved the Government in extraordinary expenses; the State Treasurer, Caid Nessim, had crossed the Mediterranean to Leghorn, leaving a deficit of twenty- five millions of francs; and the pestilence and famine of 1866, 1867, and 1868 had prevented the collection of the usual amount of revenue. But there was another and more serious reason even than these: the Bey was surrounded by Memelouk Ministers and favourites, who invariably entered his service without a piastre, and heaped up enormous fortunes in the midst of the general ruin. The Prime Minister, Mustapha, himself was a Greek slave from Scio; and the _teskera_ or order for the purchase of General Kheir-ed-Din, when a handsome Circassian youth of sixteen, has lately figured as an exhibit in the dispute as to the Ben Ayad succession. Ahmed Bey in 1855 left 120,000,000 of francs in the Tunisian treasury, to be dissipated by his successor, Muhamed “the Magnificent,” in cargoes of beautiful Georgian, Turkish, and Circassian slave-girls from Stamboul, leaving only a very small surplus to be swallowed up by French engineers in bringing pure water to Tunis over the aqueduct of Adrian. From the hour of his accession to the throne, Muhamed es Sadek was almost in the power of a series of Memelouk favourites, who found in foreign loans that source of profit which the diminished revenues of the country no longer afforded.