i58 Egypt
from military service, by which the far too lightly taxed
wealthy families were made to pay from £40 to £100 to
free their young men. By calling up two hundred and
sixty-two thousand conscripts to replenish an army of
eighteen thousand, ^250,000 was raised from the
wealthier recruits in 1886. A more questionable, though
more conventional, resource was the new tobacco duties.
For to obtain this new and '' unaffected '' revenue a pro-
mising native industry was sacrificed by a prohibition of
tobacco cultivation. It was even more unfortunate that
nothing effective could be done to redistribute the
incidence of taxation, which still fell almost entirely on
the land-worker, leaving his landlord very lightly
burdened, and the foreigner almost entirely exempt.
Agreement was, however, obtained (1885) for subject-
ing foreigners to certain taxes.
Nor can Cromerism claim to have reduced the debt.
The reduction it effected corresponded pretty closely to
the £9,000,000 that had been added, mostly to pay
off the expenses of British intervention. Thus, at the end
of Cromerism the capital value of the debt was much the
same as at the beginning. What Cromerism can claim
is that it saved Egypt from bankruptcy and from the
consequent increase of foreign control, and gave it time
to become so economically convalescent that it could
bear the burden of the debt without breaking the back of
the fellah. It is, of course, open to Egyptian Nationalists
to claim that if we had let the national movement alone
it could have got from Europe an equitable reduction of
an usurious debt and a revision of the Capitulations and
Conventions that aggravated the burden of its charges
(Dass Mahomed, Land of the Pharaohs, p. 290). Also
they may contend that the reforms of Cromerism could
have been equally well carried out by Egyptian Con-