Alfred Milner, the late under-secretary for finance in Egypt, whose England in Egypt is the best book on the subject, though it reads like a novel, has put it in this way: "It is not given to mortal intelligence to understand at one blow the complexities of Turkish suzerainty and foreign treaty rights; to realize the various powers of interference and obstruction possessed by consuls and consuls-general, by commissioners of the public debt, and other mixed administrations; to distinguish English officers who are English from English officers who are Egyptian, foreign judges of the international courts from foreign judges of the native courts; to follow the writhings of the Egyptian government in its struggle to escape from the fine meshes of the capitulations; to appreciate precisely what laws that government can make with the consent of only six powers, and for what laws it requires the consent of no less than fourteen."
It seems rather unfair to saddle the responsibility for all of these burdens and for this remarkable condition of affairs, which is unequalled in history, upon the shoulders of one man, but one man is responsible for it directly and indirectly. He is still alive, a hanger on at the court of the Sultan of Turkey, he who was at one time the most picturesque monarch of the world. Ismail Pasha became Khedive a little before the time of the close of our Civil War. Egypt had never been more prosperous than then—owing but fifteen million dollars. In 1876, when Ismail was deposed and his son Tewfik Pasha put in his place, he had increased the debt of Egypt to four hundred and forty-five million dollars. Ismail was a typical Oriental ruler; he had the typical Oriental ruler's French veneer and education, a combination which has been found to produce most serious results. When an Oriental is left alone he is a barbarian, or he used to be; now, after he has been made the talk of Paris for nine days, and has been given a state dinner at Marlborough House, and a few stars for his coat, and called "cousin," he goes home with no particular disgust for his former eccentricities of mis-government, but with a quiver full of new tastes, desires, and ambitions, and thereafter plays his rôle of monarch with one eye on the grand stands of Europe. He wants their good opinion, but he wants to get it in his own way—the old way. He begins to build railroads and hospitals, but he continues, after his past custom, to draw the money for such improvements from licensed gambling-houses or from the sale of opium. He has a French cook, but he retains the kurbash; he puts up telephones, but he does not give up the bowstring.
RIAZ PASHA,
Prime-minister of Egypt
Ismail was the first Khedive who discovered that the easiest way to get money is to borrow it. He found that all one has to do is to sign a paper, and you get the money. It was very easy for Ismail to borrow money, because the credit of Egypt was good and sound in itself, and because foreigners, who even at that time swarmed in Egypt, knew that the repudiation of debts, while possible in a powerful or free government, was not to be feared from that country. So there began a reign of extravagance for which history has no parallel. If "money breeds money," it is also true that those who spend money freely are given more chances to do so than any one else. Adventurers, charlatans, rascals of every climate and every nationality, swarmed down upon Cairo, and fought with one another for a chance to glut themselves at the repast which this reckless profligate spread for all comers. No man probably was ever so basely cheated as was Ismail, or on so magnificent a scale. And nothing remains but ruins to show where the money spent on his own personal pleasure was bestowed. That other magnificent reprobate, William M. Tweed, left monuments like the Court House to commemorate his thefts of public money; but Ismail's palaces are falling in pieces, the rain has washed the paint off the boards, the tips of the crescents are broken, and great gardens filled with fountains and mosaic paths are choked with weeds and covered with fallen leaves and the dirt and dust of neglect and decay. You can walk over long marble floors which have sunk by their own weight through the rotten foundations, and see yourself at full length in bleared mirrors surrounded by the gilt borders and blue silken curtains of the Second Empire. Ismail ordered these palaces as men order hats, and threw them away as you toss an empty cartridge from a gun-barrel. And that was all the most of them ever were, empty cartridges, mere shells of wood painted to look like marble, and gilding and mirrors, as tasteless as the buildings at the Centennial Exposition, and lasting as long.
And yet they pleased him, and he ordered more and more, so that wherever his eye might rest it would fall upon a palace which would serve as a fitting covering for his royal person, and as a testimony to his magnificence. He wanted many, and he wanted them at once. He had them built at night by the light of candles. The Palace of Gizeh, which is now a museum, was reared in this way while Cairo slept, and at a cost of twenty-four million dollars. The curtains ordered for its windows cost one thousand dollars each, and when it was found that they did not fit the windows, the entire front of the building was torn down, and a new front with windows to match the curtains was put in its place. He built an opera-house as fine as that of Covent Garden in six months, and a grotto as dark and cool as the Mammoth Cave, with stalactites of painted rope and rocks of papier-maché and mud, with its sides lined with aquariums, in which swam strange fish. The wind and the dust play through this grotto to-day; for he no sooner reared a palace in air than he turned from it to some new toy. These are the things you can see. You can hear stories—some of them true, some of them possible—of things that are past, such as his swimming-tanks where a hundred of the slaves of the harem bathed together for his edification; the pie out of which, when it was opened, there stepped a ballet-dancer; and the story of the disappearance of the Pasha who grew too rich. This is, unfortunately, a true story, and not one out of the Arabian Nights. This Pasha was invited by Ismail to see a new dahabeeyah, and never returned. But one of the attendants on the Khedive came back some weeks later with his finger bitten off at the joint. He and Ismail alone know where the Pasha who was too rich has gone.
These extravagances and these eccentricities were all in keeping with our idea of what an Oriental despot should be, but it would be most unfair and ungenerous to give only this side of Ismail's character. He was a man of much mind and of large ideas, as well as a man with the tastes of a voluptuary, and the means, for a time, of a Count of Monte Cristo. It was he who built the harbor of Alexandria; and the railways and canals that others have completed were started under his régime. All of these things—railroads, palaces, canals, and grottos made of mud—cost money; and there were other expenses. Knights of industry and rascals of all degrees extorted vast fortunes from him in indemnities for supposed failures on his part to keep up with his agreements, and to stick to the letter of concessions. Some of these, like the payment of fifteen million dollars to the Suez Canal Company, were just enough; but there was also an enormous sum given in backsheesh to Turkey to gain the consent of the Porte to a proposed change in the line of succession and the establishment of the rule of primogeniture. Up to that time the eldest male member of the ruling family had always succeeded to power, but Ismail obtained a firman from the Sultan allowing his son to follow him. The gratification of this natural vanity or love of family was not obtained for the asking, and cost his people dear. They were already groaning under a multitude of taxes; the army was unpaid; the bureaucracy was rotten throughout; bribery and extortion, unfair taxation, and open seizure of the property of others had reduced the country almost to bankruptcy. Ismail in sixteen years had brought about a state of things that threatened utter ruin, to not only the native, but to the strangers within and without the gates. The strangers made the move for reform. I have told this much of Ismail not because it is new or unfamiliar, but because it shows how, through his misrule, the foreign element was able to obtain a footing upon the shore of Egypt, which footing has now grown to a trampling under foot of what is native and properly Egyptian. This entering wedge was called the Dual Control, and France and England were appointed receivers for Egypt, just as we appoint receivers for a badly managed railroad, and Ismail was deposed, his son Tewfik taking his place.
