160 Egypt
Lord Cromer speaks of the abuses he abolished as the
" Three C's "—the kurbash, the corvee, and corruption.
The corvee, or forced labour, was a tax that fell very
heavily on the poorest fellaheen; but one that was very
difficult to remit owing to the necessity of maintaining
the irrigation system on which Egyptian cultivation
depends. This work of keeping up dykes and clearing
out ditches was estimated to employ one-eighth of the
population for a quarter of the year. And so laborious
was the labour of f' scooping mud with the hand from
the bottom of a clay drain/' that it had become difficult
to get it done even under the kurbash. Yet payment for
the work would require ^£400,000 a year, for which
international authorisation was necessary. Negotiations
for this purpose dragged on for years, as the French
required in return control by the Debt Commission of all
public works expenditure. This was refused, and at last
the British Government provided certain moneys by post-
poning the dividend on their Suez Canal shares. Other
moneys were subsequently collected, and the corvee
gradually reduced from two hundred and two thousand
men for one hundred days in 1883 to eighty-seven
thousand men in 1887. But it was not until 1892 that
an agreement was reached with the French, allowing for
££150,000 annually from the surplus, that made further
calling out of the corvee for irrigation unnecessary. The
corvee thereafter survived only as the " Nile Register/'
or list, of riparian peasants liable to be called out for
patrolling and patching the dykes during the inundation.
It was also later resorted to for recruiting a hundred
thousand children to destroy cotton worm (Egypt,
No. IM 1909, p. 21, and 1910, p. 18). The Nationalists
argue that no credit should be claimed for this reform
because the corvee had already been abolished legally