Frederick the Great, in his bad French, wrote to William the Fourth of Orange, still remains true : "Les mains ensanglantées qui ceuillissent des lauriers sont souvent detestées pour le mal involontaires qu'elles font et par ces veuves et ces orphelins qui demandent leur père et leurs parents. Il n'y a que les mains pures qui ceuillissent l'olive, qui recoivent les bénédictions d'autant plus sincères qu'elles s'employent réellement pour le bonheur de l'humanité.'

W. H. DE BEAUFORT.

NOTE.

In the December number of the Nineteenth Century Mr. Dicey makes charges of misgovernment against the Khedive of Egypt, a sovereign whose goodwill and alliance it is important for England to retain. Assuming his charges to be proved by the statements and figures he brings forward, Mr. Dicey advocates the assumption by England of the practical sovereignty of Egypt in the interests of our Empire and of the people of Egypt.

Mr. Dicey's charges, however, are based on erroneous figures and statements, and in common justice to the Khedive, who, whatever mistakes he has committed, has undoubtedly devoted his life to the improvement of his country, these mistakes of Mr. Dicey's ought to be corrected.

The first charge is that during the reign of the present Khedive he has received over 100,000,0001. sterling more than he has accounted or ever can account for. This result is brought out by showing that he has received in fourteen years 140,000,0001. of revenue and 40,000,0001. net from foreign loans, while his administrative expenditure has been only 4,000,0001. a year, or 56,000,0001., and his outlay on public works 22,500,0001., or say 24,000,0001., together accounting for only 80,000,0001. out of 180,000,0001. received.

As a matter of fact, instead of an average of 10,000,0001. a year of revenue, the Khedive's reign began with only 4,250,0001., and up to 1871, before the Moukabala redemption of future taxation began, only reached 7,600,000l. In 1874 the estimated revenue reached 9,600,0001., and the highest estimate that has been made reached the figure of 10,800,0001.; but the experience of the present commissioners gives reason to believe that 10,000,0001, is about the maximum of revenue that has ever been actually received.

The period during which the finances were controlled by the Khedive was only thirteen years, namely from 1863–4 and 1875–6 inclusive, the average revenue receipts in that time being certainly not more than 7,500,0001. per annum, giving a total receipt of 97,500,0001. instead of Mr. Dicey's 140,000,0001.

The net receipts from foreign loans Mr. Dicey estimates at 40,000,0001.; but although he has allowed for discounts and commissions, he has forgotten to include interest and sinking fund paid out. The actual net result to the Khedive, estimating the 1873 loan to bave yielded only 11,000,000). cash, as stated by Mr. Cave, was about 43,000,0001. But the interest and sinking fund repaid to the lenders amounted to the end of 1876 to no less than 34,000,0001., leaving just 9,000,0001. received from this source. Mr. Cave's estimates give even a smaller result. Adding this to the amount received from taxation, we have a total of only 106,500,0001. instead of Mr. Dicey's 180,000,0001.

This brings up Mr. Dicey's error on the receipt side to 73,500,0001.

On the expenditure side Mr. Dicey has forgotten several large items, such as the debt existing when the Khedive came into power, about 3,000,0001., the tribute to Turkey (not including private black-mail), 8,300,0001., the cost of irrigation canals, telegraphs, bridges, roads, lighthouses, &c., payments for the Halim and Mustapha estates, investments in sugar-plantations, mills and machinery (6,000,0002.).

He also estimates the cost of the railroads at only 3,200,0001., whereas they stand in the books of the Egyptian Government, according to Mr. Cave, at 13,361,0001. Mr. Dicey may think this too high a figure, but Egypt is not the only country where railways have cost more than they are worth, and the charge made by Mr. Dicey is that the Khedive cannot account for moneys received by him. Moreover, Mr. Dicey's estimate of the cost of the railways and equipment, 4,0001. per mile, is as impossibly low as the charge in the government's books is unquestionably too high.

The following is a fair statement of the items on the expenditure side, derived mainly from the report of Mr. Stephen Cave, but confirmed also from actual knowledge of what has been done. Debt previous to Ismail's succession .

£3,000,000 Administration (Mr. Dicey's figures) 13 years at 4,000,0001.

52,000,000 Tribute to the Porte

8,300,000 Railways, 1,210 miles .

13,300,000 Suez Canal, harbours, improvements, arms and accoutre. ments (Mr. Dicey's figures)

18,400,000 Purchase of Halim's and Mustapha's estates.

3,000,000 Canals

3,000,000 Sugar plantations, mills, and machinery

6,000,000 Telegraphs, bridges, roads, and lighthouses

2,000,000 Abyssinian wars

3,000,000 £112,000,000

.

Thus the items of receipt and expenditure on which we have any trustworthy information show an excess of expenditure of 5,500,0001., but there remained a floating debt of about 18,000,0001., as estimated in 1876, which would carry the balance to the other side. How much of this 18,000,0007. consisted of usurious charges, while it was being piled up, it is impossible to estimate, nor can we tell how much the Khedive was required to send privately to Constantinople in addition to the public tribute; but any impartial person would find little difficulty in accounting for the small balance without accusing the Khedive of any financial deficiency whatever.

In any case, the charge of having received 100,000,0001. that he has never accounted and never can account for is entirely unsupported by the facts.

The next and perhaps the gravest possible charge made against the Khedive is that, to gratify his own greed for land (in Mr. Dicey's own words, the restless greed of power which led him to conceive the ambition of becoming the owner of the land of Egypt and of letting no blade of grass grow in Egypt without his permission '), the Khedive has dispossessed and destroyed the homes of one million of the peasant population, and thus obtained for his own private estates one million acres of land ; that he has thereby reduced the productive power of his country, because, as Mr. Dicey shows, large estates can never produce so much as small properties cultivated by the owners.

Now, as a matter of fact, the whole estates of the Khedive, according to the report made by Mr. Sandars in 1877, amount to 485,000 acres, of which 170,000 acres have never yet been cultivated, or only to a trifling extent, and 118,000 acres are let to farmers, so that only 197,000 acres, instead of a million, represent the land owned by the Khedive and , farmed by himself. But the charge of having dis. possessed small proprietors fails even to this comparatively small extent. Mr. Dicey has forgotten or left unnoticed the fact that the greater part of the Khedive's lands were bought from two other large proprietors, Mustapha and Halim Pashas, one being paid 2,000,000l. and the other 1,000,0001. cash and 2,400,0001. in annuities-these two purchases alone representing something like 200,000 acres of good land.

The Khedive was also himself a large landed proprietor before his accession, and thus his whole estates and those given to his sons can be accounted for without any dispossession of peasant proprietors whatever.

But Mr. Dicey has also forgotten to mention the amount of land reclaimed from the desert by the present Khedive.

Mr. Cave found from the Public Register of Egypt :--
Cultivated lands in 1862

4,051,976 acres 1875

5,425,107 Increase of cultivated land in the reign of the Khedive 1,373,131 Thus the Khedive, so far from taking a million acres away from working proprietors into his own greedy hands, does not retain in his hands more than oneseventh of the cultivated land he has added to the country.

To do this he has constructed two main irrigation channels 145 miles in length and 112 minor channels, some 900 miles in all, with 426 bridges. Mr. John Fowler estimates that “the irrigation canals excavated in the present reign have involved the excavation of 65 per cent. more material than the whole Suez Canal.'

These, with telegraphs, lighthouses, sugar-mills, roads, and large bridges, are classed by Mr. Dicey with the worthless .follies and caprices of the Khedive'!

As regards the productiveness of Egypt we have the following evidence that the Khedive's reign has not diminished it.

.

Average Exports of Egypt per annum.
At present

£14,000,000
Ditto before the Khedive's reign :

Ar Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay, And a pinnace, like a flutter'd bird, came flying from

far away :

6

‘Spanish ships of war at sea ! we have sighted fifty

three !' Then sware Lord Thomas Howard : "Fore God I am

no coward; But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of

gear, And the half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow

quick. We are six ships of the line ; can we fight with fifty

three?'

II.

Then spake Sir Richard Grenville : ‘I know you are

no coward ; You fly them for a moment to fight with them again, But I've ninety men and more that are lying sick

ashore. I should count myself the coward if I left them, my

Lord Howard, To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.'

III.

So Lord Howard past away with five ships of war that

day, Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer

heaven;

But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from

the land Very carefully and slow, Men of Bideford in Devon, And we laid them on the ballast down below; For we brought them all aboard, And they blest him in their pain, that they were not

left to Spain, To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of

the Lord.

IV.

He had only a hundred seamen to work the ship and

to fight, And he sail'd away from Flores till the Spaniard

came in sight, With his huge sea-castles heaving upon the weather

bow.