THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA. 119 during the years which intervened between the opening of the Suez Canal and the financial collapse of 1876, the International tribunals would not have been established, and the restrictions imposed thereby upon the unlimited power of the Khedive could never have been introduced. Yet, as will be seen, it was owing to these restrictions, of which Nubar was the chief, if not the sole, author, that the ruin brought upon Egypt by the extravagance of Ismail Pasha was converted into an instrument for her salvation.

In Egypt the Capitulations remained in full force up to 1872. In virtue of these conventions, the subjects of European Powers resident in the Ottoman Empire were placed, in respect of all criminal and civil matters, under the sole jurisdiction of their own Consuls. With the sublime contempt for the Giaour which prevailed throughout Turkey in the days of Ottoman military ascendancy, the Mahometan authorities declined to trouble themselves in any way with the disputes between one set of Christian dogs and another. If any foreigner gave offence to a follower of Islam, he could always be dealt with in the good old-fashioned way. But if foreigners gave offence to one another, the dispute had best, from the point of view of the then dominant Ottoman race, be left to be settled in their own mean fashion by their own mean authorities. Such, in fact, was the origin of the Capitulations. But as years went by, as the Turks began to grow weak, and the Christians began to