EGYPT UNDER BRITISH SUPERVISION. 431 affecting the British occupation, laid it clown as the guiding principle of his policy that Egypt must henceforth make both ends meet. In order to effect this end, the system by which the public accounts were kept had to be simplified, so as to render it possible to ascertain under what heads of expenditure savings could best be made. Hitherto the Coptic clerks, who were exclusively employed at the Treasury, had, partly in obedience to instructions, partly in accordance with their own peculiar system of book-keeping, so complicated the records of receipts and expenditure, that it was impossible to make out under what heads the receipts and expenses of the various departments should rightly be charged. Under Mr. (now Sir) Gerald Fitzgerald, who had been granted leave of absence from his post in the Indian Treasury, the accounts of Egypt were placed on a sound footing.

In a comparatively short time Mr. Fitzgerald, with the aid of European assistants, introduced an intelligible system of accounts into the Egyptian Treasury, under which no wholesale peculation could pass without detection, while the cost of every particular department of the public service could not be falsified to any considerable extent. A committee was appointed, consisting of Mr. Edgar Vincent, who had succeeded Mr. Auckland Colvin as financial adviser; of Mr. Gerald Fitzgerald; of Blum Pasha, an Austrian financier of great ability, who is now manager of the Lander Bank at Vienna ; and of Riaz Pasha. This committee, acting on the lines