wished it. But in this he found that the majority of his followers were against him; for; £5,000,000 of British money had been lent to Egypt, and until that was paid back the scuttling policy was not acceptable to the huckstering spirit of the Radicals.
The native Government which the Conservatives had formed resigned, as a protest against the new policy of England,—or, rather, we should say, against the revival of the old policy of procrastination, uncertainty, delay, and want of vigour, which had before reduced Egypt to such sore straits.
But the worst result of this new move in the eternal Anglo-Egyptian game was, that it gave France a fresh chance to attempt once more to get a footing on the banks of the Nile. A year previously a change of Government had taken place in France, and the new Cabinet was decidedly warlike in its tendencies. For some years France had suffered from a colonising mania. She had conquered Tunis; had established herself in Madagascar; and, after a long and desultory war with China, had become possessed of the whole of Tonquin, and held the island of Formosa, pending the payment of an enormous war indemnity which she had exacted from the Government of Pekin. This success of the French arms seems to have filled the people with wild and Quixotic dreams, and they believed, and, in fact, openly proclaimed, that England's power was declining, and that France was destined to take England's place as a colonising nation.
To French minds, imbued with these views, it seemed more than ever vital to French interests that French power should be upheld in Egypt; and her interests in the Suez Canal were made the pretext for demanding in emphatic language that she should be allowed to take part in governing a country where these interests lay. England's vacillating policy had, it was declared in France, utterly ruined Egypt, which was liable at any moment to fall a prey to internecine revolt on the part of the Egyptian people, or be overrun by the Soudanese, who were growing bolder and bolder, and defying England since she had withdrawn from Souakim and Berber. If either of these two dangers should be realised, France maintained that the Suez Canal
