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and the answers to correspondents desiring to know anything from the best way of taking stains out of silk to the solution of a theorem in geometry. In short, it has everything for the learned as for the learner; and when subsidies to popular scientific journals begin in Egypt, I make no doubt it will receive the most favourable consideration.

The editor had been frank, both in his criticisms and in his hopes. But he did not at all imply by what he stated that our rule in Egypt is a failure. On that point he was very clear. "It is now possible," said he, "that a fellah should bring a lawsuit against a pasha and win it. Before the occupation it was unheard of. The taxes may be high, but everybody knows that he pays only what the Government orders. A man who has money is not afraid to use it, instead of pretending to be a beggar. The people would never consent to go back to the old order of things. There is how do you call it? - there is security."

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Then the mention of money brought him on

BRITISH CAPITAL WANTED.

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to a point that was evidently a keen one with him. "Why do not the English invest money in Egypt?" he asked. And indeed everybody here asks it. Foreigners are buying land, either for their own cultivation or to let. Natives are buying land, for Mussulmans are forbidden to lend on usury: they creep round the prohibition often by taking their interest in produce, but land is their best investment. It pays 8 to 10 per cent, and you are as sure of getting your due in Egypt nowadays as you are in England.

Yet British capital goes neither into Egyptian land nor any whither else. The Cairo electric tramways are Belgian, the gas is French, the water French and Government, the railways French and Government. Nothing British except Cook and one narrowgauge railway. There are not six British shops in Cairo. "Why do you not do it?" asked the editor again. "It would do good to Egypt, which has no capital of its own; it would do good to England by increasing her influence in the country. And it is good

business. Will

investors?"

Will you not say that to British

I told him plainly I had little influence with British capitalists, but that I would mention it; and I hereby do. I do it with the more confidence in that I find the matter referred to in Report No. 391 of the Foreign Office Miscellaneous Series-a monograph on British trade which every British trader would do well to read twice. It can be bought either directly or through any bookseller for 21d., and that being so, I am not going to waste my time and yours making an abstract of it. It tells the usual weary story-foreigners content with smaller profits, excessive rates of commission charged by English agents, unelastic terms of credit, incompetent travellers. We are ahead of any other nation, it is true -well ahead; but our lead is not increasing. In all other ways our work in Egypt may make all of us proud, but the British trader is not making the most of his chances. Government would be glad enough to accept British tenders; only often they are either

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too high or not according to the specifications, or else they do not come in at all. It seems that we-we with pinched manufacturers and workless workmen are too proud to take the trouble to supply the sort of things that Egypt wants. We ought to remember two things. First, Egypt is Eastern in that it wants things cheap; not too good, but just good enough for their purpose. Perhaps it ought to want the very best only it doesn't. Second, if Egypt is Eastern in its requirements, it is Western-while England is here -in its integrity. As the editor says, there is security.

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VIII.

WATER.

THE FIELDS OF EGYPT WHAT THE NILE IS TO EGYPT - THE BARRAGE-THE CULTIVATION OF LOWER EGYPT-HISTORY OF THE BARRAGE-THE RESERVOIR AT ASSOUAN.

December 31.-Br-r-r-r! This the land of sunshine! As the omnibus train jolted out of Cairo I shivered in my long overcoat. The other passengers in the long, second-class carriage-it was a Government carriage, and it was like a rejected cattle - van fitted up with worn-out seats from a third-rate village ale-house-were shivering worse than I. Is not this the coldest Egyptian winter within the memory of man? of man? Sitting on the little platform outside the carriage was a blackveiled woman, with a child arrayed like a rainbow; propriety would not allow that she

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