From Cleopatra's day to ours there has been no independent sovereign in Egypt. With her With her death, the land passed to Rome as a mere province. When Rome fell, it was smitten by the Saracens with the sword of Islam. Then came the Turks whose troublous sovereignty was challenged for centuries by their own creatures, the Mamelukes-enslaved Circassians who were trained to ferocity like the janissaries of Constantinople. Before the guns of Napoleon, Mamelukes and Turks shared a common fate and Egypt then became French. There was no other authority to be obeyed, and the return of a baffled Napoleon to Paris, thus left a government in vacuo. The British, who had fought Napoleon, did not step in, and the Sultan of Turkey resumed his control. Then it was that the drama, which to-day we are watching, began to take a definite shape.

As Pasha of Egypt, the Sultan appointed one of his most masterful generals. Mehemet Ali was born an Albanian and inherited to the full the Albanian's ambition, capacity, and ruthless instincts. With ruling Egypt, he was not content. Taxing the province to the bone, he set forth, like Napoleon before him, to overrun Palestine, Syria, and even Asia Minor, and he would have seized Constantinople itself, if Russia had not raised objections. This man, Mehemet, is the founder of the present dynasty of sovereigns in Egypt. His original title of "Pasha" was exalted to "Khedive." In 1914, the "Khedive" became the "Sultan" of Egypt. This year, the "Sultan" is addressed as "King"; he is "your majesty" instead of 'your highness"; he is the first King of Egypt since Cleopatra was poisoned by an asp. Once more there is a real monarch on a real throne.

Contemplating the customs of ancient Egypt, it is easy to see why the policy of the Pharaohs failed. Their greatest achievements, the pyramids, like the greatest mosques built at a later date, were merely tombs; their most sacred volume was the Book of the Dead. If the Metropolitan Museum in New York can exhibit the so-called toys of Egypt, four thousand years old, yet to-day still perfectly preserved, it is because these models were left, not for children to play with, but for the sole delectation of the dead. That the dead should survive was the aim of the Egyptian chemists who so skilfully embalmed the mummies of human beings and of cats, crocodiles, and other animals. The lesson that Egypt has had to learn is that even if the dead be immortal, the claims of the living also should be recognized. In no country has human life been held so cheap. There is a canal, still existing, which Mehemet dug between the Nile and Alexandria. It is called the Mahmoudie and it was opened within a year. Under chain and lash, 150,000 laborers were employed upon it, of whom 30,000 died, or 2,500 a month. Eyewitnesses of the Egypt of one hundred years ago agree as to the horrors of the corvée or gangs of fettered serfs, of the miserable hovels of the people, the open markets for slaves brought from all quarters, the crushing taxation, the graft, the cruelty of the courbash, or whip, and of the terrible bastinado applied to the soles of the feet; and, last but not

least, of the rampant disease. In 1835, Kinglake encountered a plague which halved the population of Alexandria, and in Cairo, then a city of 200,000 inhabitants, caused 1,200 deaths daily. When the British occupation began in 1883, the first fact to be faced was an epidemic that swept away one hundred thousand lives. Of hygiene there was no trace. Mothers believed, and in many cases still believe, that the best preventive of ophthalmia is dirt in the children's eyes. It is at least something gained that such an Egypt should have become a health resort. Railways, hotels, river steamers are thronged with visitors, many of them American.

What the native-born Egyptian has lacked is initiative. The very gateway of his country, Alexandria, was built by a conqueror and so named, and it was Europe that there made the modern harbor. It was to de Lesseps and the French, not to the Egyptians, that the world owes the Suez Canal, while it is the British who have repaired the barrages of the Nile and built the great dam at Assouan. Even the pyramids, mosques, temples, and other glories of Egypt have only been rescued from irretrievable ruin by the antiquarian zeal of the European. Of credit and commerce, the same story must be told. For the most part, it is not the Egyptian who becomes the successful banker and merchant. It is the Frenchman, the Italian, the Greek, the British, the Armen