THE COUP D'ETAT • Reassembling of Commission of Inquiry — Ministry propose to postpone payment of various short loans — Ismail protests against proposal and dismisses his foreign Ministers — England and France decline to interfere.

I HAVE been told, I know not with what truth, that if a duck's neck is suddenly cut off, the headless bird will go wobbling on for a short distance without altering its pace. In a similar fashion the responsible Ministry survived for a few weeks its moral decapitation. Whatever might have happened, the experiment of an independent Ministry under an absolute ruler /was sooner or later doomed to fail. But the failure ( was undoubtedly precipitated by the action of the \ Ministers themselves. When Ismail Pasha agreed to surrender his estates, he had some reason to / expect that by this act, accompanied as it was by the appointment of a responsible Ministry, he had got rid of the Commission of Inquiry. The new Ministry, however, had hardly become installed in office,* before the Khedive discovered his mistake. When the Commission held its last sitting in August, 1878, it \ was agreed that it should reassemble before the end