Colonel Colborne, a soldier formerly attached to Hicks Pa,sha's staff,
gives in Wednesday's Times an account of an interview with Stanley, which is specially interesting as con- taining Stanley's opinion as to the ease with which the Nile stream could be diverted, and Egypt turned into a desert. "The -Victoria Nyanza," he says, " is on a plateau like an inverted basin. It could be made to trickle over at any point." Supposing the present King of Uganda should take it into his head in a fit of ill-temper, he might order a thousand natives to drop stones across the Ripon Falls ; and if he kept them at it for nine months, the thing would be done. His father once actually contemplated doing it, not for mischief, but in accordance with some irrigation plans of his own. Though the scheme has often been mooted before by imaginative Europeans, the possibilities for injuring English interests thus possessed by a black King whom no one in England can bring himself to regard seriously, have never before been so clearly brought home to the public mind. The practical danger, however, is, of course, less than nothing, or (shall we say?) no greater than that from the scheme for making England into a Norway by diverting the Gulf Stream into the Panama Canal, and thus depriving. Great Britain of her hot-water heating apparatus.
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