t tragedy
is discernible. Ferdinand de Lesseps, Ismail Pasha and the Egyptian
people gave civilization and commerce one of its greatest gifts in the
Suez Canal, but the cost to them was all they had--and they were never
repaid.

"Every day in the year a dozen great ships make the procession through
the canal--the ninety miles of slow travelling which saves them the
cost of circumnavigating the great continent of Africa. They pay well
for it, and the owners of the canal shares wax fat. England controls
the canal, the construction of which John Bull attempted in every
manner to prevent. English ships bound from "home" to Bombay cut down
the distance from 10,860 miles to 4,620 miles by taking the canal
route, and the vast majority of ships which pay tolls to the canal
company fly the British flag. Germany comes second, a long way after;
Holland third, and the French, whose dreams of commercial empire cut
the ditch, are fourth. The United States has not been represented in
the canal in a decade by any commercial ship--only vessels of the navy
and yachts of the Yankee millionaires show the Stars and Stripes to the
Bedouins of the desert who bring their caravans from Mt. Sinai to the
canal."

MOST IMPORTANT OF CANALS

"The tonnage of the Suez is not one-third as great as that of the Sault
Ste. Marie Canal in the Great Lakes, but its importance to the commerce
of the world is greater than that of any other passageway of the seas.
Wherever there is a strait or a narrow passage through which commerce
may go, there is sure to be a British flag flying, a British band
playing, and a red-coated Tommy Atkins strutting about with a swagger
stick. Suez is not an exception.

"Fourteen centuries before Christ, nearly 3,500 years ago, the Pharaoh
Setee I., father of Rameses the Great, cut a canal fifty-seven miles
long from a branch of the Nile delta to the bitter lakes, which are now
part of the Suez Canal and which were then the northern extremity of
the Gulf of Suez. That connected the Mediterranean with the Red Sea,
and Egypt waxed great. But the nation decayed, and the sands of the
desert filled up the ditch. Eight hundred years later the Pharaoh
Necho undertook to dig the canal. More than a hundred thousand lives
were sacrificed to the project, but it was abandoned when a priest
predicted that its completion would cause Egypt to fall into the hands
of a foreign usurper. A hundred years after Necho, the Persian Dar