Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/22

8, exhausting the resources of a country that was very poor to begin with, had brought Egypt to the verge of bankruptcy. The crisis was delayed for a time by the purchase of the shares of the Khedive in the Suez Canal by England for four millions sterling. But this could only postpone, it could not prevent, the inevitable ruin.

Seeing the shadow on the wall, Ismail at last humbled himself so far as to ask advice, and applied to England to send out to Cairo a man skilled in finance to investigate his affairs, and if possible restore order and confidence. I was in Cairo at the moment that Mr. Cave appeared on the scene, and began the Herculean task. He soon found that he had no place to stand on; that he was sinking in a bottomless abyss. It was hard to find out what were really the debts of Egypt, for the Khedive had an ingenious system of bookkeeping — a kind of "double entry" — by which a large part of what came into the treasury went into his own private purse, while debts that were incurred were charged to the State. To disentangle this confused mass of accounts, seemed almost hopeless. To meet these debts, resources of every kind were gone; the Khedive had taxed the country till it could bear no more; he had wrested everything from his miserable people; and thus at the same moment had exhausted his resources at home and his power of borrowing abroad.

It were useless and sickening to follow this steady descent from one depth to another lower still. It is enough to recognize the peculiar and extraordinary circumstances out of which rose the Anglo-French Control, of which we have heard so much. This was an arrangement by which the finances of the country were placed in the hands of French and English Controllers, who were to collect the taxes and pay the interest on the debt. This has been very severely criticized. I confess I do not like it either in principle or in