and conferred a real boon on the long-suffering fellaheen. It reduced the interest on the Unified debt by one-third – namely, from 7 per cent to 4 per cent, and saved the Treasury over a million and a half sterling per annum. This is the one instance of foreign intervention on behalf of the unfortunate people who are the most innocent as well as the most helpless victims of these complications.
When Mr Gladstone came into office he had these three facts before him – the re-established Control, the Commission of Public Debt, and the Law of Liquidation. Two of them – the Commission of Public Debt and the Law of Liquidation – were international engagements, placed under the sanction of that highest of all moral authorities, the concert of Europe. Lord Salisbury could not have prevented them coming into existence, either with or without our participation. He would have been opposing a generous act to the Egyptian people had he done so. Mr Gladstone could never have thought for a moment of repudiating them. He would have been violating the concert of Europe, and inflicting a wanton wrong on Egypt, had he made the attempt. But there was one way in which he might very easily have marked his disapproval of the policy of his predecessors. If he had seen any reason for declining the "heritage of woe," he might have withdrawn his friend and confidant, Sir Evelyn Baring, from the new Control. That institution was still in its infancy. It was hardly twelve months old, and the French Government would have been only too happy to carry it on alone. Can any one conceive of such an absurdity as that Mr Gladstone ever for a moment thought of withdrawing from the Control, and leaving Egypt to France? If he did not, where was his "heritage of woe"? – in the Control, with his friend Sir Evelyn Baring at the head of it? in the Commission of Public Debt, constituted by five of the great Powers? or in the Law of Liquidation, which relieved the Egyptian people of a million and a half sterling per annum of liabilities which they could not meet?
Whatever he may discover now in his unfathomable conscience, the proof is abundant enough that Mr Gladstone accepted his heritage of woe in Egypt very calmly. So far as the published Blue-books show, it caused him very little anxiety during his first eighteen months in office. With the exception of two sets of correspondence tabled by Lord Salisbury in the first session of 1880, and the report of the Law of Liquidation, also a legacy of his, there is nothing but a few consular reports to indicate what was going on in Egypt from the spring of 1880 to the autumn of 1881. So far as our Foreign Office is concerned, these eighteen months are a blank in the history of Egypt. The country does not seem to have existed, for certain statesmen, who were bending the whole strength of their intellects to the setting up of Land Courts in Ireland, which Mr Parnell and Mr Henry George will very probably knock down again within ten years. In these eighteen months that Mr Gladstone devoted to landlord-killing and general confiscation in Ireland, his Nemesis was sowing on the Nile the seeds of a frightful retribution. It is a baleful but clearly provable fact, that Mr Gladstone's heroic ecstasies of reform are invariably followed by some cruel disenchantment abroad, that costs the country tenfold, or even a hundredfold, the value of the parliamentary curries with which Radicals love to have their palates fired by him. In 1853 he ex-
