164 Egypt
the law. This would have mattered less were it not that
the Egyptians, though a peaceable folk, were, and are
still, both litigious and lawless. Annual charge-sheets
under Cromerism of four thousand serious crimes and
eight hundred murders suggests that its policing was less
effective than that of Ismail. Nor are its special re-
pressive measures attractive, such as the unsatisfactory
Brigandage Commissions abolished in 1888.
But there is one contribution that we made to Egypt
that would have been clearly out of reach of a National
Government newly emerged from a drastic writing down
of its liabilities. Such a National Government could not
have commanded the credit that was obtained by Cromer-
ism for the extension of irrigation enterprises and of the
cultivated area. Those schemes previously carried out
under Ismail and Mehemet Ali had been both costly
and faulty. The first British enterprise was the experi-
mental patching up by Scott Moncrieff of Mehemet Ali's
barrage at Cairo. This was followed by the building of
a barrage at Assiut and Zifta. Then followed the great
Assouan Dam, completed in 1902. As a result, for a
comparatively small outlay and within ten years,, the
cotton crop was trebled, the sugar crop more than
doubled, and the country covered with light railways
and roads for marketing its produce. And with the in-
crease of irrigation went an improved regulation of the
all-important water rights. The peasant was no longer
left at the mercy of the Pasha, for a British inspector
saw that he got his share of water. At the same time
he was no longer plundered to the same extent by the
Greek usurer, whose ravages were checked by the Law
Courts and Land Banks. Lord Cromer's claim to have
increased the number of small proprietors by nearly half
a million to a total of one and a quarter million is open