72 Egypt
£1,200,000 for all concessions outside two hundred
metres from the Canal bank, and £640,000 for
the Company's rights in the Freshwater Canal.
This was all paid off by 1869. The Canal was then
finished with paid and mostly imported labour and
with modern machinery; and it was opened with
festivities of appropriate extravagance (November 17,
1869). No less extravagant were the anticipations of the
advantages that were to accrue to Egypt from this service
to Europe. For, first of all, Egypt lost the considerable
profits from travellers by the overland route, and then it
lost even such share as the concession allotted to Egypt
in the future profits of the Canal.
By 1871 the £20 Canal shares were worth less than
£7, and no dividend had been paid. The Constantinople
Conference then allowed a surtax toll of thirty per cent.,
and the Canal thereafter rapidly became a highly profit-
able property. But not for Egypt that had built it. For,
in 1875, Disraeli, on behalf of the British Government,
had taken advantage of Ismail's insolvency to buy
through Rothschilds for £4,000,000 Ismail's founders'
shares, which he was then offering in Paris as security
for a loan; while Egypt's fifteen per cent, share of the
profits was later ceded in payment of a debt of £700,000
to French financiers, who in the following seven years
collected therefrom about double the total of their original
loan. These two properties are now estimated as being
worth somewhere about £30,000,000.
Such, very briefly, is the history of this transaction,
disastrous for Egypt, financially, economically, and
politically. Europe should have constructed this enter-
prise, that served its own economic interests only, by
acquiring the concession to do so from Egypt at a price
that would have paid off the Egyptian debt, and by com-