86 Egypt
city of pyramids and pavilions, peopled with real Bedawin
on white camels. Yet the total of his expenditures for
this purpose, including the eleemosynary embassies to
Constantinople, the expedition to Crete, and the enter-
taining of Europe, did not reach the fifteen millions which
was the value of the domain lands (daira) that he
eventually surrendered to his creditors. While the
sixteen millions spent on the Suez Canal and the two
millions for suppressing slavery in the Sudan were
services to Europe, if not so to Egypt.
As Ismail's extravagance eventually led to a quarter
century of British occupation of Egypt, the accounts of
his administration are nearly all coloured either into a
defence or into an indictment of British policy. In the
first case, Ismail appears as the villain, in the other as
the victim of the piece. But this would seem to be giving
him an undue importance. He takes his proper place
between Abdul Aziz of Constantinople and Abdul Aziz
of Morocco just as the Egyptian crisis takes its place
between the course of events in Tunis and that in Turkey.
That it was the British and not the French that occupied
Egypt was due to no superiority of British over French
statesmanship in enterprise or in intrigue, but to the force
of circumstances having driven the British rather than the
French into action. Ismail's personality only counts in so
far as Egypt may complain of him that, if he had had as
much courage as he had cleverness, he might have saved
Cairo from foreign occupation even as Constantinople
was saved.
The foreign occupation of Egypt began almost im-
perceptibly as a part of Ismail's financial operations.
For, by 1873, *n sP^e °^ a buoyant revenue and the
bumper prices of cotton, the Khedive was already
heavily, though not yet hopelessly, dipped. The revenues