io6 ^4 Short History of the Middle East
happiness of its subjects, the new era showed no great advance on
the old: security was as low, justice as rare, exaction as cruel, policy
as foolish. In certain aspects indeed there was progress. . . In-
creasingly officials appointed to high office had something of
modern education. There was greater specialization of function.
There were, in fact, the bones of reasonable government into
which the rare ability and goodwill of a governor might yet infuse
life/1 For example, the 'honest, vigorous, and liberal' Mohammed
Rashid Pasha, who governed for five years from 1853, re-opened a
score of disused irrigation-canals and founded a company for river-
navigation; and he was only the precursor of Midliat Pasha who
in three short years 1869-72 began to organize for the first time a
system of land-registration, in an attempt to put an end to tribal
lawlessness. He made plans for river-reclamation, river-naviga-
tion, industrialization, town improvements. He founded muni-
cipalities and administrative councils, enforced conscription, tried
but failed to suppress corruption, and in Baghdad started a news-
paper, military factories, a hospital, an alms-house, an orphanage,
and numerous schools whereby the literacy-rate among towns-
people rose from perhaps -J per cent, in 1850 to some 5 to 10 per
cent, by 1900. In this mass of projects completed or attempted 'it
is not difficult to find traces of hastiness, of economic considera-
tions mistaken or ignored, of excessive confidence in the catch-
words of progress, of a preference for the spectacular to the
judicious... . Yet his vision, his patriotic energy, his absolute
integrity performed greater works than his imperfect education
could mar', and as recently as twenty years ago his name was still
'constantly on the lips of townsmen and tribesmen, and always as
an enlightened innovator'.2 Midhat applied in its entirety the
modernized Ottoman administrative system. *A numerous class
of regular officials, the Effendis, stepped into the place of the old
arbitrary Pashas. Literate but not otherwise educated, backward
but decorous in social habit, uniform in a travesty of European
dress, exact and over-refined in the letter of officialdom, com-
pletely remote from a spirit of public service, identifying the body-
public with their own class, contemptuous of tribe and cultivator,
persistent speakers of Turkish among Arabs and, finally, almost
universally corrupt and venal—such were -the public servants in
x Longrigg, op. cit., 281.
2 Longrigg, op. cit., 298 if.