THE SUEZ CANAL. 35 Suez Canal could hardly have been constructed in it present form but for the financial support thus given it at the cost of Egypt, a fact which French publicists have always been unwilling to admit. In Egypt, until the end of Ismail's reign, all public works in Egypt were carried out by forced labour. Th corv6e system is almost indispensable in a country whose prosperity, if not whose existence, depends upon the maintenance in good order of the dykes and canals which secure its irrigation. Labour forthcoming at an hour s notice is absolutely necessary to keep the country from the risk of being overflooded or deprived of water by any injury to the vast network of canals fed by the Nile; and such labour can only be secured by the local authorities having power to call on the services of the fellaheen in case of a dam bursting, or a bank being undermined by the action of the current. Such occurrences were far more frequent then than they are at present. The system of the corvee was liable to abuse, and, as a matter of / fact, was habitually and grossly abused. But it never! was so signally abused as it was in the case of the\ Suez Canal. By the terms of the concession, Egypt *: Hjj qQt rceive any benefit, direct or indirect, from ' the construction of the Canal. The concessionaries may have imagined that Said would pay for the labour he had agreed to supply. If they did so imagine, they displayed an almost infantile ignorance of the ways in which things were then managed in Egypt. The Moudirs of the various provinces