THE ROAD TO RUIN. loi should not have been made known to the public.

The Levantine community were naturally averse to any disclosure of the virtual insolvency of the Egyptian Government, not only because such a disclosure would cut down the profits they were reaping so largely by the renewals of their advances, but because it would endanger their chance of recovering these advances in their integrity. The instinct of all gamblers is to back their luck, and as every one of the Khedive's Levantine creditors hoped to get out himself before the crash came his interest was to say as little as possible of what he might know or suspect, and do all in his power to keep up the impression, which many of them, I believe, entertained honestly to the very last, that the financial difficulties of Egypt, in as far as they existed, were only temporary, not permanent.

Of course it was known — it could not but be known — to the representatives of the great powers of Europe at the Khedivial Court — that the Government to which they were accredited was short of money.

Both England and France, the two Powers which had the keenest interest in Egypt, were each anxious to secure a preponderating influence in the valley of the Nile, or, perhaps, to speak more accurately, to hinder the other from acquiring any such preponderance. Somehow or other intelligence reached Colonel Stanton, at that period the British Consul-General at Cairo, that negotiations had been set on foot in Paris ( with the object of raising money by the sale, or the / hypothecation, of the Khedive's Suez Canal shares. \