86 
ADMINISTRATION AND POPULATION. 
ment is the plantation of a garden of the choice fruit- 
trees and vegetables of the coast; and his example 
has been imitated by the Bim Bashaw, commandant 
of the troops, who is now laying out a garden in a 
conspicuous part of the city. 
Since the departure of Abd-el-Galeel with his 
Arab followers, the Walad Suleiman, for the neigh- 
bourhood of Bornou, the province of Fezzan has 
certainly enjoyed profound tranquillity. But on 
account of heavy taxation, high customs' dues, 
and other clogs to free commerce, the people are 
sinking deeper and deeper into poverty and wretch- 
edness, and, except in the capital, there is a general 
retrograde movement. The Ottoman yoke is a 
peculiarly heavy one : it keeps the people in order, 
but it crushes them ; and perhaps the Fezzanees 
may now regret somewhat the wholesome anarchy 
that distino'uished the Arab chieftain's reiofn. 
As I have said, the entire population of the 
ten districts of Fezzan is, according to the last 
Turkish census, only about twenty-six thousand souls, 
of whom about eleven thousand are males, including 
the children. The disproportion of the sexes arises 
in part from the number of female slaves, in part 
from the emiofration of the men to the commer- 
cial countries of the interior, either for temporary 
gain, or permanently to escape from the grinding 
weight of taxation. 
The whole amount of revenue collected by the 
Government is estimated at fifty thousand mah- 
boubs per annum. Twenty -three thousand of 
