W HEN a great orator sp , ' :•om the steps of a
throne he is pretty sure to be , and the interest excited by Prince Napoleon's recent t i on British policy in Egypt is therefore easily understood. • After all the allowances de- manded by national jealousy have been made, the fact still remains that the French alliance is the only one of great im- portance to England or the world, and anything which threa- tens or seems to threaten its continuance deserves the most anxious attention. When a Prince of the Imperial House, therefore, bids French gentlemen go on with a commercial project because "England will not declare war against France for such a cause," quiet men are justified in rubbing their eyes and asking whether there ever was any danger which justified that remark. Is anybody threatening, or thinking of threatening, or dreaming that he may one day have to think of threatening war in order to stop the Suez Canal ? The mere statement of the question supplies the answer, and reduces the Prince's speech from an ominous manifesto into an indiscretion. He was carried away by his own eloquence and his friendship for M. de Lesseps, till he at once exagger- ated the opposition of England, and distorted the true and very serious question at issue.
The object of the energetic adventurer who changed the Suez Canal from a dream into a project was from the first, as we have so frequently shown, a twofold one. He wished, in the first place, to cut the canal which, as he dreams, will turn the current of Oriental trade into the Mediterranean, give it, that is, to France and Italy, instead of to Great Britain, and in the second place to secure a hold for France upon the valley of the Nile. To this end he demanded and gradually secured concessions which included not only the right to cut the canal—which was all he professed to want,—not only a grant of forced labour to the extent of 20,000 men for many years on end, but a claim to a mile on each side of the canal in full sovereignty, a provision which would, if executed, have made the Canal Company as powerful in Egypt as the East India Company ever was in Bengal. The British Government, which does not want Egypt, but which must fight Europe rather than let any but a third-rate Power possess it, took alarm at these concessions, and at first, we have reason to believe, in spite of some official denials, resisted the canal altogether. That plan failed, as it ought to have done—it being no part of Lord Palmerston's duty to resist the development of the world's material resources, or even to retard the advance of Southern Europe lest perchance it should injure Great Britain—and a more moderate scheme was adopted. The Porte was induced to prohibit forced labour in the general interest of humanity— the suffering thereby inflicted being, apart from all philan- thropic considerations, ruinous to Egypt,—and to cancel the one-mile concession as obviously impairing the rights of the suzerain. It is admitted by all sides, including the French lawyers consulted by the Duke de Moray, that in thus acting the Porte is within its legal power, and it is not easy to prove that Sir Henry Bulwer was wrong in inducing the Sultan to exercise his right. Already, without this concession, the French residents have become the virtual aristocracy of Egypt. It is not long since they compelled the Pasha to order and to witness the public degradation of an Egyptian officer accused of having jostled a Zouave, and within this month the stationmaster of Cairo confessed to an English gentleman that he dared not restrain the outrages of a French postilion who was stamping about on the station demanding fifteen shillings an hour for his horses, and threat- ening everybody with a big stick, because the offender was a Frenchman. Had lie been an Englishman he would have been sent before the Consul at once; but as he was a French- man that course would have made out of a squabble a "dip- lomatic affair." The daily repetition of such incidents, the sight of swarms of French overseers, the habit of using French money, and, not to be unjust, the spectacle of a great and beneficent French work, the freshwater canal now opened, creates among all Egyptians the idea that Egypt, which they never apparently think of claiming for themselves, must one day be French—an impression equivalent to partial conquest. The diplomatic struggle for influence is, perhaps, in almost all countries a seductive mistake, but in Egypt we must, for our own security, be accounted at least the equals of all other foreigners, and French sovereignty over the line of transit would have finally destroyed that equality. The resistance to the canal may be, as Prince Napoleon says, merely another proof that English statesmen are aged ; but the resistance to a French possession of Egypt would be continued by states- men younger than Earl Russell, and lees imbued with the notions of 1815 than the Premier. Even Mr. Gladstone would murmur if the transit route became French, and con- fess uneasily that Great Britain was at last directly threat- med. In urging M. de Lesseps, therefore, to disregard Eng- land, for England will never go to war to prevent the Suez Canal, Prince Napoleon is simply urging his countrymen either to believe a truism, or to maintain claims which are confessedly fatal to the independence of Egypt, and conse- quently to one of the very few fixed ideas of British polioy. Nobody is resisting the canal, or if any diplomatist still considers obstruction to that work within the sphere of his duties he, as the Prince himself puts it, is acting without the consent and against the will of the British people, which most assuredly will fight for no such end. If the canal can be cut at French expense so much the better for England, which will thereby be spared the cost of transhipment upon all light goods. If in cutting it Frenchmen acquire wealth or influence with Egyptians, or new openings for enterprise, or novel con- sideration in the world, so much the better also. It is well that enormous enterprises should be greatly rewarded, and nothing could benefit Europe more than visible proof that undertakings of imperial magnitude were not outside the pale of farsighted commercial speculation. But French sovereignty over any section of Egypt within or near the transit route is a widely different thing—a contingency which no ministry will ever foresee with patience, and which will, in the last resort, be resisted, despite any number of petulant outbursts. The responsibility in that case does not rest with us, but with the aggressive power.
We are happy to believe that the Emperor of the French is, as usual, wiser than his impulsive cousin, and that the diplomatists at Constantinople who take their cue from him, and not his cousin, have at last come to an arrangement. The canal is to go on, under some compromise as to labour, which is not yet made clear, but the basis of which will be com- pulsion, compensated by heavy wages, and M. do Lesseps is left to acquire all the " influence " he can obtain. If French consuls misuse that influence long as they are doing at present, they will find it decay without England making of every squabble a diplomatic affair. On the other hand, the claim to the mile on each side is to be formally given up, in consideration of certain funds to be paid out of the Egyptian Treasury. This looks, at first sight at all events, like a. reasonable arrangement, and we may hope that it will not again be necessary either for a French prince to talk of war with Great Britain to maintain the right to dig a deep ditch through Egypt, or for Great Britain to resist the conversion of the banks of that ditch into a colony of France. England is not so selfish as the Prince would have her to be, but she is selfish enough to resolve that her best route to India shall not belong to a monarch who, once owning it, could stop our communications at will, could without despatching a soldier compel us to keep up a Red Sea fleet, and could render India a burden by the armed watchfulness which, there as at home, he would compel us to maintain. It is this, and not the canal, which the British Government now resists, and though in ordinary cases "cure," as Sir Cornewall Lewis said, "is cheaper than prevention," that remark does not apply when the catastrophe to be prevented is amputation.
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