could not coin. Egypt, the fertile, the wealthy, the progressive,
was, indeed, at the time all but insolvent. At the suggestion of
foreigners, "profitable investments," which yielded literally
nothing, had been freely made for many a year, and the sole
results were money difficulties and debt. The European financiers
had managed admirably for their shareholders; but, having assumed
the annual national income at a maximum, instead of a minimum,
they had brought the goose of the golden eggs to the very verge
of death. The actionnaires were to receive, with a punctuality
hardly possible in the East, the usurious interest of six per
cent., not including one per cent. for sinking fund. Meanwhile,
the officers and officials, military, naval, and civil, had been
in arrears of salary for seven to fifteen months; and even the
Jews refused to cash at any price their pay certificates.

Nothing could be more unwise or unjust than the exactions of the
creditors. Men must live; if not paid, they perforce pay
themselves; and thus, of every hundred piastres, hardly thirty
find their way into the treasury. Ten times worse was the
condition of the miserable Fellahin, who were selling for three
or four napoleons the bullocks worth fifteen per head. Thus they
would tide over the present year; but a worse than Indian famine
was threatened for the following. And the "Bakkal," at once petty
trader and money-lender, whose interest and compound interest
here amount, as in Bombay, to hundreds per cent., would complete
the ruin which the "low Nile" and the Christian creditor had
begun.

A temporary reduction of interest to three per cent., with one
per cent of amortization, should content the greedy shareholder,