The French Government is evidently determined that it will not
relax its hold upon the details of government in Egypt. M. Ribot has assented at last to the conversion of part of the Egyptian Debt, but upon extraordinarily mean conditions. The Preference Five per Cent. Stock and the Four-and-a-Half per Cent. Loan of 1888, together amounting to twenty-four millions, are to be exchanged for a new preference loam, bearing interest not exceeding 4 per oent.,—that is, probably 3i per cent. in all. The Daira and Domain Loans, thirteen and a half millions together, are also to be similarly reduced, but no further conversion of the entire new debt is to take place for fifteen years. The money saved, again, is to accumu- late until all the Powers have agreed as to the purpose to which it shall be applied. The project, moreover, of selling the Daira and Domain estates, with a view to paying off debt, though sanctioned, is only sanctioned to the extent of 2300,000 a year. They will therefore take some twenty years to sell, during which time the separate establishments for their management, which are partly French, are to be kept up. The French Government, in fact, gives way upon a point, the actual conversion, upon which resistance would have involved something like a robbery of the Egyptian taxpayer, but retains for Frenchmen all the profit, and for itself all the right of interference that it can. That policy is exceedingly small, and raises a suspicion that the French Foreign Office has been greatly pressed by individual firms which benefit by the restrictions.
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