milar work in Europe, and one-third
more than they received in their own country, and to provide them with
food, dwellings, etc. In principle this was the _corvee_, or forced
labour. The fellaheen were taken away from their homes and set to work
at the canal, though there is no doubt that they were as well treated
and better paid than at home. The injustice and impolicy of this clause
had always been insisted upon to the sultan by the English government,
and when Ismail Pasha became viceroy, in the year 1863, he saw that
the constant drain upon the working population required to keep twenty
thousand fresh labourers monthly for the canal was a loss to the country
for which nothing could compensate. In the early part of 1864 he refused
to continue to send the monthly contingent, and the work was almost
stopped.

By the consent of all the parties, the subjects in dispute were
submitted to the arbitrage of the French Emperor Napoleon III., who
decided that the two concessions of 1854 and 1856, being in the nature
of a contract and binding on both parties, the Egyptian government
should pay an indemnity equal to the fellah labour and $6,000,000 for
the resumption of the lands originally granted, two hundred metres only
being retained on each side of the canal for the erection of workshops,
the deposit of soil, etc., and $3,200,000 for the fresh-water canal, and
the right of levying tolls on it. The Egyptian government undertook to
keep it in repair and navigable, and to allow the company free use of
it for any purpose. The sum total of these payments amounted to
$16,800,000, and was to be paid in sixteen instalments from 1864 to
1879.

The company now proceeded to replace by machinery the manual labour,
and, thanks to the energy and ingenuity of the principal contractors,
Messrs. Borel and Lavalley, that which seemed first of all to threaten
destruction to the enterprise now led to its ultimate success. Without
the machinery thus called into action, it is probable that the canal
would never have been completed when it was. The ingenuity displayed
in the invention of this machinery, and its application to this vast
undertaking, constituted one of the chief glories in the enterprise of
M. de Lesseps.

The work now proceeded without interruption of any kind; but at the end
of the year 1867 it became evident that more money would be needed, and
a subscription was opened for the purpose of obtaining $20,000,000 by
means of on