When the visitor to Cairo first grasps the extent of his own ignorance of Egypt, and appreciates that if he is to understand its monuments and the signs of past times about him he must study the history of the whole world for forty centuries, he is apt to retreat precipitately. Later, as a compromise, he proposes skipping thirty-nine centuries and limiting his researches to the study of the political and social conditions of Egypt during the last ten years. And when he begins jauntily on this he finds that all that has gone before, from Rameses II. to Mehemet Ali, is as simple as the line of Popes in comparison with the anomalies and intricacies of government that have arisen within the last decade. Yet the very intricacies of the subject give to this study a fascination entirely apart from its rare picturesqueness, and no matter what manner of man he may be, he cannot but find some side of the situation which appeals to him. If his mind be constituted like that of a ready reckoner he can revel in unravelling the intricacies of the Caisse and the Laws of Liquidation; if it is judicial, he can perhaps elucidate the powers of the Mixed Tribunal; if romantic, he has the career of Ismail, the most magnificent of patriots and profligate of monarchs; and if it turns towards adventure and the clash of arms, he can read of the heroic fanaticism of Fuzzy Wuzzy, the son of the Mahdi, of the futile mission of Gordon, of Stewart's march across the desert, and of the desperate valor of the fight at Aboo-Klea.

But it is the paradoxical nature of Egypt's present situation which gives it its chief interest, and lends to it the peculiar fascination of a puzzle, or one of Whistler's witticisms. For, while Egypt is not free, as is Morocco, nor under a protectorate, as is Tunis, she is still free and still protected. She is free to coin money, to maintain an army, and to make treaties; and yet she pays six million dollars a year tribute to Turkey as a part of the Ottoman Empire, and her army that she is allowed to maintain is officered by English soldiers, whom she is also allowed to maintain. She may not pay out the money she is allowed to coin without the consent of foreigners; she cannot punish the man who steals this money, be he Greek, English, or American, without the approval of these foreigners; and her official language is that of one foreign power, her ostensible protector is another, and her real protector is still another, whose commands are given under the irritating disguise of "advice."

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.

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.

But although this was the first important and most official recognition of the right of the stranger to dictate to Egypt, he had already obtained peculiar rights in Egypt through capitulations, or those privileges granted in the past to foreign residents in Turkey and its dependent state of Egypt. In the sixteenth century the foreigners who traded in these Oriental countries stood in actual need of protection from the natives. Because they were foreigners they were regarded with such lack of consideration that, in order to balance the disadvantages of having their shops destroyed and their throats cut, the Sultan gave them certain privileges—such as immunity from taxation, immunity from arrest, the inviolability of domicile, and the exemption from the jurisdiction of the local courts.

These privileges were unimportant when the foreign element in Constantinople was so little and so weak that the position of the Chinamen in San Francisco in '49 was that of a powerful aristocracy in comparison; but the snake warmed at the hearth-stone grew, and the Sultan's empire dwindled, and the privileges which were given to bribe the foreigner to come and to remain became a bane to Turkey and a curse to the weaker state of Egypt. The inviolability of domicile, for instance, is at this very day made use of by foreigners who are carrying on some wickedness or who have committed a crime for which they cannot be arrested by an Egyptian policeman unless he is accompanied by an official representative of the country to which the foreigner belongs. Let us suppose, for example, that the police of New York wished to raid a gambling-house. This, I know, is asking a good deal of the reader's intelligence, but we will suppose it to be a gambling-house which has not paid its assessment to the police regularly, and which should be given a lesson. All that the proprietor of the house would have to do, did capitulations extend in New York, would be to lease the house to an Italian, or to take out papers of naturalization from the British government. You can imagine the chagrin of an officer of the law who, when he goes to make an arrest, is confronted with a German who says he is an Englishman, and whose domicile is accordingly sacred. This, as you can imagine, would impede the wheels of justice.

When I was in Cairo a Greek, who had taken out papers as an American citizen, flaunted this fact in the faces of the native police whenever they came to arrest him for keeping a gambling-house. They applied to our consul-general, Mr. E. C. Little, of Abilene, Kansas, who so far differed from the etiquette observed by some other consuls-general in Cairo as not to delay and not to warn the criminal. He sent his soldiers to be present at the arrest. The offender met this by bringing forth another American citizen of Greek parentage, to whom he claimed to have leased the house, and whose family were inside. Mr. Little, feeling that the American flag did not look well as a cloak for gambling-houses, and being a young man who has assisted at county-seat fights and who can pitch three curves, said that if the roulette tables were not out of the house in twenty-four hours he would himself break them into kindling-wood with an axe. This incident shows how the capitulations of the sixteenth century are acting as stumbling-blocks to the Egyptian of to-day, even when the consuls-general are willing to assist the native government, which is seldom.

This is not all. The immunity from full taxation, now that the foreigners are among the richest inhabitants of Cairo, is most manifestly unjust; and though the mixed courts of an international judiciary have done away with trial of the foreign resident, or lack of trial, in civil cases, by the several consuls-general, the abuses of the capitulations are still a grievous and most unjust imposition by the great powers, ourselves included, upon a weaker one. To return to the Dual Control and to the story of the growth of the foreigners' hold on Egypt. The Dual Control was unpopular; so was the foreigner and his capitulations, who, waxing fat on the weaknesses of the country after Ismail's debauchery of its strength, grew insolent—so insolent that the cry raised by a general in the Khedive's army of "Egypt for the Egyptians" was taken up, and found expression in the Arabist movement or rebellion. Its leader was Arabi Pasha. He wanted what the Know-Nothing party of America wanted—his country for his countrymen. What else he wanted for himself does not matter here. He was, in the eyes of the Khedive, a rebel. In the eyes of some of the people he was the would-be preserver of his country against the plague of the foreign invasion.

The trouble began at Alexandria, where the excited people attacked the foreign residents, killing some, and destroying valuable property. Men-of-war of the two powers represented in the Dual Control had already arrived to put down the rebellion. When the riot on shore was at its height, the English war-vessels bombarded the city. The bombarding of Alexandria was war, but it was not magnificent. There are certain things made to be bombarded—forts and ships of war—but cities are not built for that purpose or with that ultimate end in view. The English people, as a people, however, regret the bombardment of Alexandria as much as any one. The French war-vessels, for their part, refused to join the bombardment, and so were requested by the English admiral to sail away and give the other half of the Dual Control a clear field. Different people give you different reasons for the departure of the French fleet at this crisis. Some say that M. Clemenceau, who hated M. Freycinet and his policy, possibly raised the cry of the German wolf on the frontier, and pointed out the danger at home if the army and navy were engaged otherwise than in protecting the border. Others say that, like the good one of the two robbers in the Babes in the Wood, one of the Dual Control drew the line at murder or at the bombardment of a country she was supposed to protect. Plundering the Egyptians was possible, but not bombarding their city. They stopped at that. The English followed up the bombardment of Alexandria by the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, which ended the rebellion. The Citadel of Cairo surrendered at their approach, and the Khedive's rule was again undisturbed. The English remained, however, to "restore order," and to see to the "organization of proper means for the maintenance of the Khedive's authority." They have been doing that now for ten years, and it is interesting to note that they have made so little progress that the last "disorder" in Cairo was due to the action of the British consul-general himself in allowing the young Khedive just twenty-four hours in which to dismiss one of his cabinet. This can hardly be described as "maintaining the authority of the Khedive," which the English had promised to do.

After the battle of Tel-el-Kebir Great Britain stood undoubtedly in the position of the savior of the Khedive if not of Egypt. Her soldiers had crushed the rebellion, and as she had sent her Only General and one of the royal family and many thousands of good men to do it, and as she had lost not only men, but money, she thought she deserved something in return. The something she has taken in return has been taken gradually, and is the control of Egypt at the present day. It is possible that had the English not lost many more men and much more money in the campaign in the Soudan, which followed immediately after the suppression of Arabi, they might not have gone so far as they have gone in settling themselves in Egypt. But there was a not unnatural feeling that the Soudan campaign, which had cost so much, and which was a failure in all but in showing the bravery of the British troops, ought to be paid for, or made up to the English in some way. I should like to go into the story of this most picturesque and heroic of campaigns, but it would require a book by itself. Its history is briefly this: The religious and military chieftain known as "the Mahdi," shortly after the defeat of Arabi, threatened all Egypt from the Soudan, which rose under his leadership. General Hicks, an Englishman, with ten thousand men, in the service of the Khedive, was sent against him. He was killed, and most of the troops with him. The English, who were at that time the only power in Egypt with authority of any sort back of it, and who were virtually in control, felt that they should take the responsibilities of their position as well as its benefits, and avenge the massacre, drive back the Mahdi's forces, and, if possible, crush him and them for all time. The campaign was later further complicated by the presence at Khartoom of Major-General C. G. Gordon, who had gone there to lead back in safety the Egyptian troops still remaining in the Soudan. He was, after his arrival at Khartoom, virtually a prisoner at that place, which is a mud city on the banks of the Nile far above the fifth cataract. The attempts to rescue him and to suppress the Mahdi were equally unsuccessful.

This is, in a few words, the story of a campaign which has been unequalled within the last twenty years in picturesqueness, heroism, and dramatic surprises. It had been said that the old days of personal bravery, of hand-to-hand slaughter, and of the attack and defence of man against man, were at an end; that owing to the new weapons of war, by which an enemy can be attacked when several miles distant from the attacking party, when the pressing of an electric button destroys an army corps, and when turning a handle will send three hundred bullets a minute into a mass of infantry, the necessity for personal courage was over. But seldom in history has there been as fierce personal encounters as in the Soudan, or as unusual methods of warfare. On the one hand were the naked supporters of the Mahdi, armed with their spears and knives, and protected only by bull-hide shields, but actuated by a religious fanaticism that drove them exulting at their enemies, and with no fear of death, but with the belief that through it they would gain joyous and proud immortality. Against them were the British troops, outnumbered ten to one, with hundreds of miles of sandy desert before, behind, and on every side of them, cut off from communication with the outside world, in a country barren and unfamiliar, and attacked by tens of thousands, who came when they pleased and where they pleased, rising as swiftly as a sand-storm rises, and disappearing again as suddenly into the desert.

When I was in Cairo I was told of one of the Mahdi's men who continually rushed at a British square during an engagement holding his shield clear of his body as he advanced to throw a spear, and then retreated again. This looked like the worst form of foolhardiness to the English, until they saw that he was protecting with his shield his little boy, who was hiding behind it, and that when the chance offered, this child, who could not have been more than seven, and who was as naked of protection as his father, would throw a spear of his own. The father was wounded four times, but each time the bullet struck him he only shook himself, as a dog shakes off water, and once more rushed forward. When he fell for the last time the boy tumbled across him, unconscious from a wound in his thigh. The surgeons dressed this wound and bandaged it; but when the child came to and saw what they had done, he leaped up and tore the clothes from around him, and then, as the blood from the reopened wound ran out, fell over backwards dead. The English officer who told this story asked if fighting such men could be considered agreeable work from any point of view.

But the Soudan is only of interest here as showing how, having lost so much through it, the British did not feel more inclined than before to evacuate Egypt, although there were many who thought, as a few still think, that Egypt has cost them too much already, and more than they can ever get back. The loss of Gordon was perhaps the disaster of all the most keenly felt. How keenly is shown partly by the statue the English have placed to him in Trafalgar Square, surrounded by their kings and greatest generals. It shows him with one foot placed on the battlement of Khartoom, with his arms folded, and with the head thrown slightly forward, looking out, as he had done for so many weary months, for the relief that came too late. This monument is a reproach to those whose uncertainty of mind and purpose cost Gordon his life. It was doing a brave thing to put it up in a public place, being, as it is, a standing reminder of the neglect and half-heartedness that lost a valuable life, and one that had been risked again and again for his country. It is not only a monument to General Gordon, but to the English people, who have had the courage to admit in bronze and stone that they were wrong.

For the last ten years the English have been as tardy in getting out of Egypt as they were in going after Gordon into the Soudan. They have repeatedly declared their intention of evacuating the country, not only in answer to questions in the House, but in answer to the inquiries of foreign powers. But they are still there. They have not been idle while there, and they have accomplished much good, and have brought benefits innumerable to Egypt. They have improved her systems of irrigation, upon which the prosperity of the land depends, have strengthened her army, have done away with the corvee, or tax paid on labor, and with the kurbash, or whip used in punishment, and, what is much the most wonderful, they have brought her out of ruin into such a condition of prosperity that she not only pays the interest on her enormous debt, but has a little left over for internal improvements. There has also been a marked change for the better in the condition of the courts of justice, and there has been an extension of a railroad up the Nile as far as Sirgeh.

But the English to-day not only want credit for having done all this, but they want credit for having done it unselfishly and without hope or thought of reward, and solely for the good of mankind and of Egypt in particular. They remind me of those of the G. A. R. who not only want pensions and medals, but to be considered unselfish saviors of their country in her hour of need. There is no reason why a man should not be held in honor for risking his life for his country's sake, and honors, if he wants them, should be heaped upon him, but not money too. He either served his country because he was loyal and brave, or because he wanted money in return for taking certain risks. Let him have either the honors or the money, but he should not be so greedy as to want both. England has made a very good thing out of Egypt, and she has not yet got all she will get, but she wants the world to forget that and look upon her as an unselfish and enlightened nation that is helping a less prosperous and less powerful people to get upon their feet again. Of course it is none of our business (at least it is our policy to say so) when England stalks forth like a roaring lion seeking what she may devour all over the world. Americans travel chiefly upon the Continent, and unless they go into out-of-the-way corners of the world they have no idea how little there is left of it that has not been seized by the people of Great Britain. For my own part I find one grows a little tired of getting down and sailing forth and landing again always under the shadow of the British flag. If the United States should begin with Hawaii and continue to annex other people's property, we should find that almost all of the best corner lots and post-office sites of the world have been already pre-empted. Senator Wolcott once said to Senator Quay: "I understand, Quay, you want the chairmanship of the Library Committee. You seem to want the earth; if you don't look out you will interfere with my plans."

If the United States had taken away the little princess's island from her and continued to plunder weaker nations, she would have found that England wants the earth too, and that she is in a fair way of getting it if some one does not stop her very soon. There are a number of good people in England who believe that for the last ten years their countrymen have spent their time and money in redeeming Egypt as a form of missionary work, and there are others quite as naÏve who put the whole thing in a word by saying, "What would we do with our younger sons if it was not for Egypt?"

Three-fourths of the officers in the army of the Khedive are English boys, who rank as second lieutenants at home and as majors in Egypt. They are paid just twice what they are paid in the English army, and it is the Khedive who pays them and not the English. In this way England obtains three things: she is saved the cost of supporting that number of officers; she gets the benefit of their experience in Egypt, which is an excellent training-school, at the expense of the Egyptians; and she at the same time controls the Egyptian army by these same officers, and guards her own interests at Egypt's cost. And as if this were not enough, she plants an Army of Occupation upon the country, and with it menaces the native authority. The irrigation of Egypt has of late been carried on by Englishmen entirely and paid for by Egypt; her railroads are built by the English; her big contracts are given out to English firms and to English manufacturers; and the railroad which will be built to Kosseir on the Red Sea may have been designed in Egypt's interest to carry wheat, or it may have been planned to carry troops to the Red Sea in the event of the seizure of the Suez Canal or of any other impediment to the shortest route to India. We may not believe that the Egyptians are capable of governing themselves, we may believe that it is written that others than themselves shall always rule them and their country, but we must prefer that whoever do this should declare themselves openly, and act as conquerors who come and remain as conquerors, and not as "advisers" and restorers of order. Napoleon came to Cairo with flags flying and drums beating openly as an enemy; he did not come in the disguise of a missionary or an irrigation expert.

And there is always the question whether if left alone the Egyptians of the present day could not govern themselves. Those of the Egyptians I met who were in authority are not men who are likely to return to the debauchery and misrule of Ismail. They would be big men in any country; they are cultivated, educated gentlemen, who have served in different courts or on many important diplomatic missions, and whose tastes and ambitions are as creditable and as broad as are those of their English contemporaries.

The two most prominent advisers of the Khedive at present are his Prime-minister, Riaz Pasha, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tigrane Pasha. The first of these is a Turk, the second an Armenian and a Christian. It is told of Riaz that he was brought to Egypt when a boy as a slave. A man who can rise from such a beginning to be Prime-minister must have something in him. He showed his spirit and his desire for his country's good in the time of Ismail, whose extravagances both he and Nubar Pasha strenuously opposed, and his aid to the English in establishing Egyptian finance on a firmer footing was ready and invaluable. He has held almost every position in the cabinet of Egypt, and is not too old a man to learn new methods, and if left alone is experienced and accomplished enough as a statesman to manage for himself.

Tigrane Pasha struck me as being more of a diplomat than a statesman, but he showed his strength by the fact that he understood the weak points of the Egyptians as well as their virtues. It is not the enthusiast who believes that all in his country is perfect who is the best patriot. To say that such a man as this—a man who has a better knowledge of many different governments than half of the English cabinet have of their own, and who wishes the best for his Khedive and his country—needs the advice or support of an English resident minister, is as absurd as to say that the French cabinet should govern themselves by the manifestoes of the Comte de Paris. These men are not barbarians nor despots; they have not gained their place in the world by favor or inheritance. Their homes are as rich in treasures of art and history and literature as are the homes of Lord Rosebery or Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, and if they care for their country and the authority of their Khedive, it is certainly hard that they may not have the right of serving both undisturbed.

The Khedive himself has been very generally represented through the English press as a "sulky boy" who does not know what is best for him. It is just as easy to describe him as a plucky boy who wishes to govern his own country and his own people in his own way. And not only is he not allowed to do this, but he is treated with a lack of consideration by his protectors which adds insult to injury, and makes him appear as having less authority than is really his. He might very well say to Lord Cromer, "It was all very well to dissemble your love, but why did you kick me down-stairs?"

Sir Evelyn Baring, now Lord Cromer, and the ruling figure in Egypt, has served his country as faithfully and as successfully as any man in her debt to-day. He has been in Egypt from the beginning of these ten years, and he has been given almost unlimited power and authority by his own country, of which his nominal position of Consul-General and Diplomatic Agent is no criterion. He is a typical Englishman in appearance, broad-shouldered and big all over, with a smooth-shaven face, and the look of having just come fresh from a bath. In conversation he thinks much more of what he has to say than of how he says it; by that I mean that he is direct, and even abrupt; the Egyptians found him most unpleasantly so. But were he more tactful, he would probably have been better liked personally, but would not have succeeded in doing what he has done so well.

I do not like what he has done, but I want to be fair in showing that for the work he was sent to do he is probably the best man England could have selected. A man less self-reliant might have feared to compromise himself with home authorities, and would have temporized and lost where Lord Cromer bullied and browbeat and won. He is a very remarkable man. He studies for a half-hour every day after breakfast, and plays tennis in the afternoon. When he is in his own room, with a pipe in his mouth, he can talk more interestingly and with more exact knowledge of Egypt than any man in the world, and your admiration for him is unbounded. In the rooms of the legation, on the contrary, or, again, when advising a minister of the Khedive or the Khedive himself, he can be as intensely disagreeable in his manner and as powerfully aggressive as a polar-bear. During the last so-called "crisis" he gave the Khedive twenty-four hours in which to dismiss his Prime-minister. He did this with the assurance from the English Foreign Office that the home government would support him. He then cabled with one hand to Malta for troops and with the other stopped the Black Watch at Aden on their way to India, and called them back to Cairo, after which he went out in full sight of the public and banged tennis balls about until sunset. A man who can call out "forty, love!" "forty, fifteen!" in a calm voice two hours after sending an ultimatum to a Khedive and disarranging the movements of six thousand of her Majesty's troops will get what he wants in the end, and a boy of eighteen is hardly a fair match for him.

As I have said, the English press have misrepresented the young Khedive in many ways. He is, in the first place, much older both in appearance and manner and thought than his age would suggest, and if he is sulky to Englishmen it is not to be wondered at. They could hardly expect his Highness to regard them as seriously as his friends as they regard themselves. The Khedive gave me a private audience at the Abdine Palace while I was in Cairo, and from what he said then and from what others who are close to him told me of him, I obtained a very different idea of his personality than I had received from the English.

He struck me as being distinctly obstinate—a characteristic which is so marked in our President that it can only be considered one of the qualifications for success, and is probably the quality in the Khedive which the English describe as sulkiness. What I liked in him most was his pride in his army and in the Egyptian people as Egyptians. It is always well that a ruler should be so enthusiastic over what is his own that he shows it even to the casual stranger, for if he exhibits it to him, how much more will he show it to his people! The Khedive has gentle tastes, and is said to find his amusement in his garden and among flowers and on the farm lands of his estates; he speaks several languages very well, and dresses and looks—except for the fez and his attendants—like any other young man of twenty-three or twenty-four in Paris or New York. His ministers, who know him best, describe him as having a high spirit, and one that, as he grows older and will be guided by greater experience, will lead him to firmer authority for his own good and for the good of his people.

One remark of the Khedive's which is of interest to Americans was to the effect that the officers in his army who had been trained by Stone Bey, and those other American officers who entered the Egyptian army after the end of our Civil War, were, in his opinion, the best-trained men in their particular department in his army. This is the topographical work, and the making of maps and drawings; but those Americans who are in charge of Egyptian troops on the frontier are also well esteemed. It is the English, however, who have made the fighting part of the army what it is. Before they came the troops were unpaid, and badly treated by their officers, but now the infantry and the camel corps and artillery have no trouble in getting recruits.

The Egyptian is not a natural fighter, as is the Soudanese, who fights for love of it, but he has shown lately that when properly officered and trained and well treated, he can defend a position or attack boldly if led boldly. I suggested to the Khedive that he should borrow some of our officers, those who have succeeded so well with the negroes of the Ninth Cavalry and with the Indians, for it seemed to me that this would be of benefit to both the officers and the Egyptian soldier. It was this suggestion that called forth the Khedive's admiration for the Americans of his army; but, as a matter of fact, the English would never allow officers of any other nationality than their own to control even a company of the Egyptian army. They cannot turn out those foreigners who are already in, but they can dictate as to who shall come hereafter, and they fill all the good billets with their own people; and if there is one thing an Englishman apparently holds above all else, it is a "good billet." I know a good many English officers who would rather be stationed where there was a chance of their taking part in what they call a "show," and what we would grandly call a "battle," than dwell at ease on the staff of General Wolseley himself; but, on the other hand, if I were to give a list of all the subalterns who have applied to me for "good billets in America," where they seem to think fortunes grow on hedges, half the regimental colors from London to Malta would fade with shame.

And Egypt is full of "good billets." It is true the English have made them good, and they were not worth much before the English restored order; but because you have humanely stopped a runaway coach from going over a precipice, that is no reason why you should take possession of it and fill it both inside and out with your own friends and relations. That is what England has done with the Egyptian coach which Ismail drove to the brink of bankruptcy.

It is true the Khedive still sits on the box and holds the reins, but Lord Cromer sits beside him and holds the whip.