no A Short History of the Middle East
rueful comment was, 'This is the best financial and political trans-
action ever made even by a British government; but a very bad one
for us'.1 The end could not now be long delayed. By April 1876
the state was bankrupt; and an international Caisse de la Dette
Publique was set up, with British and French commissioners to
receive the Egyptian revenues, supervise the railways and the port
of Alexandria, and maintain the payments due to the creditors.
In short, the bailiffs were in', and the Dual Control, British and
French, had begun to regulate the public life of Egypt.
Egyptian nationalists in our own day have claimed that Isma'il
was an enlightened ruler actuated primarily by the desire to
develop his country, and that it was his misfortune, due to inex-
perience of the pitfalls in international finance, that submerged
him and Egypt under the burden of debt.2 Closer examination of
his character, however, fails to exonerate him to this extent. He
was the first of his dynasty to be superficially Europeanized in
education and tastes. To instal in Egypt all the external evidences of
European material civilization, regardless of the cost, was for him
to be in the forefront of progress, to be hailed by the world as a
truly illustrious prince. He was actuated by personal ambition and
an inordinate love of display, rather than by prudent regard for the
lasting improvement of his country's economy. Vast and costly
development-schemes were embarked on after entirely inadequate
study of their practicability. Intoxicated by the showers of gold
which descended on him so frequently in the first ten glorious
years of his reign, it was all one to the Khedive whether they were
expended on public works or an agricultural scheme, the annexa-
tion of some remote Equatorial province, or on a new palace and
lavish entertainments; Milner doubted whether the portion of
Isma'iTs loans devoted to works of permanent utility, excluding
the Suez Canal, equalled 10 per cent, of the amount of debt which
he contracted; and meanwhile his agents drove and pillaged the
peasantry without mercy.3
1 In 1871 Gladstone had refused to discuss an offer to buy a share in the
Canal Co., regarding it as purely a matter for private financiers, and unbefitting a
government; but Disraeli with Levantine tuition grasped its imperial implica-
tions, and immediately on coming to power in 1874 had sent Baron Lionel de
Rothschild to Paris to try to re-open negotiations for a purchase.
2 This is the case put forward by P. Crabites: Ismail, the Maligned Khedive,
and by M. Rifaat Bey, op. cit., ch viii, 'Ismail the Magnificent*.
3 Milner, op. cit., 179. For a summary of the impressions of an unofficial
and sympathetic British resident in Egypt, cf. Gordon Waterfield, Lucie Duff
Gordon, ch. XLIIL