J" THE STORY OF THE KHEDIVATE.

have been made till many years later, and under conditions very different from those under which it came into existence, supposing the undertaking had been controlled by any other man than Ferdinand de Lesseps. / M. de Lesseps was in France at the time of the death of Abbas Pasha in July, 1854. Within an hour of his receiving the news, as he himself has told me, he was on his way to Egypt to claim from the new Viceroy, in virtue of an old promise, the grant of a concession for the construction of a ship canal across the Isthmus of Suez, if ever he came to the throne. M. de Lesseps might have said with Caesar, Vent vidi vii:i, when he returned to France with the concession in his pocket He then proceeded to Paris and formed a French Company for the construction of the canal.

Here, however, his difficulties commenced. A question was raised at Constantinople as to how far the Egyptian Government, under the treaty of 1841, was authorized to cede land forming part and parcel of the Ottoman dominions without the consent of the suzerain Power. The Sultan, at the instigation of the British Government, refused to approve the concession on the grounds that, by its terms, a foreign company was entitled to erect forts in order to protect the entrance to the canal at Port Said and Suez, to occupy the banks with troops under its \ own command, and to exercise authority over a strip of land, of about a kilometre in breadth, on either side of the canal. It was argued that those stipulations \