rty of the Egyptian Government in
the year 1968.

The opening of the canal placed Egypt once more on one of the greatest
highways of the world's commerce, and promised to bring endless wealth
to her ports. That hope has not been fulfilled. The profits have gone
almost entirely to the foreign investors, and a certain amount of trade
has been withdrawn from the Egyptian railways. Sir John Stokes, speaking
in 1887, said he found in Egypt a prevalent impression that the country
had been injured by the canal[354].

[Footnote 354: Quoted by D.A. Cameron, _Egypt in the Nineteenth
Century_, p. 242.]

Certainly Egypt was less prosperous after its opening, but probably
owing to another and mightier event which occurred at the beginning of
Ismail's rule. This was the American Civil War. The blockade of the
Southern States by the federal cruisers cut off from Lancashire and
Northern France the supplies of raw cotton which are the life-blood of
their industries. Cotton went up in price until even the conservative
fellahin of Egypt saw the desirability of growing that strange new
shrub--the first instance on record of a change in their tillage that
came about without compulsion. So great were the profits reaped by
intelligent growers that many fellahin bought Circassian and Abyssinian
wives, and established harems in which jewels, perfumes, silks, and
mirrors were to be found. In a word, Egypt rioted in its new-found
wealth. This may be imagined from the totals of exports, which in three
years rose from L4,500,000 to considerably more than L13,000,000[355].

[Footnote 355: _Egypt and the Egyptian Question_, by Sir D. Mackenzie
Wallace (1883), pp. 318-320.]

But then came the end of the American Civil War. Cotton fell to its
normal price, and ruin stared Egypt in the face. For not only merchants
and fellahin, but also their ruler, had plunged into expenditure, and on
the most lavish scale. Nay! Believing that the Suez Canal would bring
boundless wealth to his land, Ismail persisted in his palace-building
and other forms of oriental extravagance, with the result that in the
first twelve years of his reign, that is, by the year 1875, he had spent
more than L100,000,000 of public money, of which scarcely one-tenth had
been applied to useful ends. The most noteworthy of these last were the
Barrage of the Nile in the upper part of the Delta, an irrigation canal
in Upper Egypt, the Ibrahimiyeh Canal, and the commencement of the Wady
H