70 Egypt
concession for the Canal. At any other conjuncture Pal-
merston would have seen to it that the concession never
became a canal. But when Said asked our Consul-
General whether the British would support him in
opposing the French project, the answer had to be in the
negative, because the French had then just joined us in
invading the Crimea to keep the Russians out of Con-
stantinople. All that Palmerston could do was to delay
the Sultan's formal ratification of the concession for two
years. As compensation to us, Said gave us the Cairo-
Alexandria railway concession that his father had so
resolutely refused, and permitted the establishment of
the Bank of Egypt (1856). He also allowed us to send
troops through to the Indian Mutiny by the overland
route.
The conditions under which the Canal was constructed
were no more creditable to Europe than were those
of the other concessions and credits in which Egypt was
subsequently involved. De Lesseps, in his repudiations
of the original promoters of the scheme, the St
Simonians and the British group, and in his reckonings
with his friend and patron, Said, was no more scrupulous
than any other Egyptian concessionaire. And if the Suez
scandal never became such an esdandre as did that of
Panama, it was probably because the Egyptians, not the
French, were the sufferers. For the credits were so easily
obtained, and the construction had so few engineering
obstacles, that with any reasonable efficiency and
economy the enterprise should never have got into
difficulties. The construction was simply scooping sand,
the climate healthy, local labour good and gratis, and the
capital value of the concession enormous. For it com-
prised a lease for ninety-nine years of valuable land and
mineral rights, with a right to forced labour for four-