SECOND STAGE OF INTERVENTION. 173 Nineteenth Century, in December, 1877, on the debts of the Khedive, produced an effect utterly incommensurate with any little intrinsic merit it may have possessed. Previously to its publication, the general belief had been that the enormous mass of debt with which Egypt had been burdened under Ismail's reign, had been occasioned, as Mr. Cave had reported, by reckless waste and extravagance, by non-productive enterprises, by exorbitant payments to the agents who had negotiated his loans, and by unprofitable outlays of all kinds of expenses for which nothing could be shown.

If this belief was correct, it followed that any attempt to discover how the debt had been incurred, however interesting as an historical study, could be of no great service to the creditors of Egypt.

In order to dispel this belief, Nubar was determined the truth should be made public. In accordance with information he gave me, I wrote the article above referred to, which furnished, for the first time, an intelligible answer to the question, what had become of the vast sums which Ismail had amassed, partly by foreign loans, partly by private borrowing, and partly by exorbitant taxation ? The answer was to the effect that the main cause of the financial embarrassments of Egypt was the land greed, which had enabled the Khedive to become, within the space of little more than ten years, the owner of a million of acres, that is, of one-fifth of the cultivated soil of Egypt. Supposing this statement to be correct, it followed that Ismail had appropriated