Page:The Egyptian Difficulty and the First Step out of it.djvu/40

36 for his family. Neither in his own reign, nor in that of his son, has this engagement been observed. The history of the reigns of Ismail and Tewfik is a grotesque satire upon the preamble of the firman. The non-fulfilment of its prime condition incontestably invalidates it.

And now as to its legality. We venture to think that the firman of 1866 was an immoral transaction. It was not the spontaneous act of the Sultan Abdul Aziz; it was obtained by increasing the Egyptian Tribute. Egypt was at that time already insolvent; so also was Turkey. The Porte required new revenues to pledge for new loans, and in 1871 did pledge this increment of the Egyptian Tribute for a loan of £5,700,000. By this addition Ismail committed his insolvent country to an additional charge upon its already insufficient, and then rapidly diminishing, revenues, in order to obtain an exclusively personal benefit. The persons he dispossessed of their chance of inheritance were not parties to the transaction. Their rights were bought over their heads, on the false pretext stated in the preamble of the firman, with money that did not belong to the purchaser, and the expenditure of which imperilled the financial stability of the country with the government of which he was entrusted, as well as the rights of the bondholders who had lent their money, never dreaming of this new burden upon Egyptian resources. It does not add to the morality of the transaction that vast sums were spent on the purchase of influence in Constantinople in 1866, and