Commerce to a sentimental scruple about Egypt. On the 6th January 1882, the Dual Note was despatched to Cairo, and the "heritage of woe" began to bear its appropriate fruit. But let Mr Gladstone's countrymen observe where it came from, and how. The testator was not Lord Beaconsfield or Lord Salisbury. It was M. Gambetta, and, strangely enough, it was one of the last acts of his short-lived Administration. He put Mr Gladstone on the fatal Avernian slope, which landed us in the bombardment of Alexandria, the war of 1882, the Suakim campaign of 1884, the Nile expedition, the fall of Khartoum, and the unknown fate of Gordon. These events followed in logical and irresistible sequence from the Dual Note of January 1882. Their development cannot be better described than in words which will be familiar to every elector of Mid-Lothian, Mr Gladstone having used them there only a few months ago. "There is not a step we have taken which has not been the rigid, the inexorable consequence, one linked to the other by chains which cannot be broken; which has not been the absolute and necessary consequence of that – I do not say guilty, because it was well intended, but – most unhappy and unfortunate proceeding."
Such is the noble array, the ascending series, of our benefactions to a down-trodden and oppressed people. By the bombardment of Alexandria, an outrage which no other European Power would join us in, and which no new rule of international law has yet been invented to justify, we inflicted on Egypt a money loss of over four millions sterling, in the shape of indemnities. By way of penance we have since gone all round Europe, hat in hand, asking the great Powers to join us in raising a loan to pay for the wanton destruction committed on an open commercial port by British ironclads. The bombardment of Alexandria was certainly the most expensive act of buccaneering in the history of the world, and the poor fellaheen have to pay for it. Item second, we smashed up Arabi Pasha at Tel-el-Kebir at a cost to ourselves of an extra three-halfpence on the income-tax, and to the fellaheen of at least two millions sterling. Item third, we saddled Egypt with an army of occupation, which we charge for at the rate of £300,000 a-year, all to be extracted as we best can from the fellaheen. Item fourth, we have, since 1880, saddled Egypt with a civilian army of foreign officials, more costly even than our troops. In March 1882, three months before the riots in Alexandria, the number of foreigners in the Egyptian service was 1325, and their salaries aggregated £375,000 a-year. Sir Evelyn Baring, in the financial report prepared for the Conference last year, acknowledged as among the most crying abuses of the country, that it was being governed to death by functionaries native and foreign. In 1880, the whole number of public employees, he said, was 14,254; and in 1883, it had increased to 17,490, or nearly 20 per cent in three years. There had been in the interval a great crowd of old officials pensioned off, and the pension-list had grown from £208,000 to £325,000. Item fifth, we completely demoralised the finances of the country, raising the expenditure extravagantly while the main branches of revenue were falling off. The Egyptian Budget of 1884, submitted to the Conference, showed an increase of expenditure, as compared with 1880, of £211,000, which Sir Evelyn Baring thought might be
