THE NORTHBROOK MISSION. 403 man would ever have agreed to make the original canal if he had not considered he possessed a monopoly during the period of a hundred years for which the concession was granted. As against this, it may be pleaded that Ferdinand de Lesseps was emphatically not a prudent man; that at the time when he obtained his concession public opinion was so unfavourable to the success of his enterprise, that he may reasonably have neglected to contemplate the contingency of a second canal ; and that he may have purposely omitted all claim to any monopoly as being likely to furnish the British Government, under Lord Palmerston, with a fresh ground for using his influence with the Porte to prevent the execution of his enterprise. If, as a general principle, it seems sharp practice to avail one's self of a possibly accidental flaw in a lease in order to deprive the lessee of the consideration for which he made the purchase, it may fairly be argued, on the other hand, that in this particular instance the lessor had been so scurvily treated throughout the whole transaction that he was fully justified in availing himself of any flaw in the lease in order to evade an onerous and one-sided bargain.

The proposal for the construction of a rival canal was communicated in due course to the British Government, and, from what I gathered, caused considerable annoyance to the Foreign Office. The case was submitted to the Law Officers of the Crown, and they gave it as their opinion that though no monopoly was granted by the concession to M. de Lesseps, it must