, henceforth receives a title
equivalent to "King" and is styled "His Majesty."

CHAPTER XV

BRITAIN IN EGYPT

It will be well to begin the story of the expansion of the nations of
Europe in Africa by a brief statement of the events which brought
Britain to her present position in Egypt. As we have seen, the French
conquest of Tunis, occurring a year earlier, formed the first of the
many expeditions which inaugurated "the partition of Africa"--a topic
which, as regards the west, centre, and south of that continent, will
engage our attention subsequently. In this chapter and the following it
will be convenient to bring together the facts concerning the valley of
the Nile, a district which up to a recent time has had only a slight
connection with the other parts of that mighty continent. In his quaint
account of that mysterious land, Herodotus always spoke of it as
distinct from Libya; and this aloofness has characterised Lower Egypt
almost down to the present age, when the events which we are about to
consider brought it into close touch with the equatorial regions.

The story of the infiltration of British influence into Egypt is one of
the most curious in all history. To this day, despite the recent
agreement with France (1904), the position of England in the valley of
the Lower Nile is irregular, in view of the undeniable fact that the
Sultan is still the suzerain of that land. What is even stranger, it
results from the gradual control which the purse-holder has imposed on
the borrower. The power that holds the purse-strings counts for much in
the political world, as also elsewhere. Both in national and domestic
affairs it ensures, in the last instance, the control of the earning
department over the spending department. It is the _ultima ratio_ of
Parliaments and husbands.

In order fully to understand the relations of Egypt to Turkey and to the
purse-holders of the West, we must glance back at the salient events in
her history for the past century. The first event that brought the land
of the Pharaohs into the arena of European politics was the conquest by
Bonaparte in 1798. He meant to make Egypt a flourishing colony, to have
the Suez Canal cut, and to use Alexandria and Suez as bases of action
against the British possessions in India. This daring design was foiled
by Nelson's victory at the Nile, and by the Abercromby-Hutchinson
expedition of 1801, which compelled the surrender of the French army
left