quadruplicated, by cables laid in 1888 from Port Said to Aden; in 1887 £rom England via Portugal to Malta; in 1891 from Port Said to Bombay; in 1897 from Vigo in Spain to Gibraltar; in 1898 by a direct cable from England to Gibraltar; and in 1899 from Gibraltar to Alexandria. This constitutes a line, if we are to omit indirect connections, triplicate in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, but quadruplicate in the Atlantic and Red Sea.
There was another remarkable feature about this line of cables: it became progressively under British control So long as Egypt was in hands other than our own« Egypt was its weak point. Time And Lord Cromer have brought a remedy. Again, up to 1898 all our cables landed either at Vigo in Spain or at Carcavellos in Portugal There was little reason against this arrangement, certainly so far as Portugal was concerned. For we should not go to war with Portugal, and if we went to war with any other Power, Portugal, being a neutral Power, might preserve the cables landed on her shore intact against a belligerent. Nevertheless, for further security, a special cable, as mentioned, was laid in 1898 direct from here to Gibraltar and thence to Malta, at a cost of £806,000, while a land-line across France, over which the bulk of the Indian traffic used to pass to Marseilles, and thence by cable to Malta, was given up. An all-British connection was thus successfully established.
Against these high advantages conferred by the joint purse arrangement, there was a drawback, however. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the time appeared to have come for reducing the rate to India. The system of charging so much per word had been established in 1876, the rate fixed being 4s. 6d. per word. In 1886 it was reduced to 4s. 0d., and remained at that figure. The number of words constituting the Indian traffic was singularly stable: 2,077,000 words in 1880, and 2,111,000 words in 1899. But about 1897 a certain increase began to appear in the number of
