The Montgomery advertiser., 1909-06-11

Port Said, Egypt.--on the grea, st Port Said stands the bronze statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps his right hand extended in a gesture of invitation to the mariners or all nations to take their ships through the great canal which was the fruit of his genius and diplomacy. Not one word is there to indicate that his for tune and good name lie buried in the failure of another canal, halfway round the world.
 The romance of the Suez Canal is suggested by everything the visitor sees at Poft Said-the "turnstile of the nations" But the tragedy of the canal, the terrible cost of life, the shameful waste of money. the ensiave- ment of the Egyptians in government tai and financial bondage, the wreck of French hopes and aspirations-noi one hint of all that tragedy is dis cernible. Ferdinand de Lesseps" ls- mall Pasha, and the Egyptian people gave civilization and commerce one of its greatest gifts in the Suez Ca. nal, but the cost to them was all that they had, and they were never re. paid.
 Every day in the year dozen great ships make the procession through the canal, the ninety miles slow traveiing which saves them the cost of circum- navigating the great continent of Africa. They pay well for it. and the owners of the canal shares wax fat. England controls the canal, the con- struction of which John Bull attempted In every possible manner to prevent. English ships bound from home" to Bombay cut down the distance from i0,s6O miles to 4,620 miles by taking z 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; Hol- land, third, and the French. whose dreams of commercial empire cut the ditch, are fouith. The United States of America has not been represented in the canal Tn a decade by any com mercial ship-oniy vessels of the navy and yachts of the Yankee miliionaires show the Stars and Stripes to the Be- douins of the desert who bring their caravans from Mt. Sanai to the canal.
 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. Wher- ever there Is a strait or narrow pas sage 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 $500 years ago. the Pharaoh Seti I, father of Rameses the Great. cut a canal fifty-seven miles long from d branch of the Nile delta to the bitter lakes, which are now a 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 hundred thousand lives were sacri- ficed to the project, but 1t was a5an- completion would cause Egypt to fall into the hands of a foreign usurper A hundred years after Necho, the Per- sian Darius took up the work on the abandoned canal, but his engineers told him that it's completion would cause deiuge and he desisted. About 3o6 yearssbefofe Christi was born, Ptolemy sPhiladelphus,r constructed a lock and dam canal through which ships made the journey from one of the mouths of the Nile to the site of modern Suez Continued wars inter rupted commerce. and the locks and dams fell into decay, so that Cleopat- ra's navy was unable to escape to the Red Sea by canal. The Roman en- gineers later patched up the canal so that their galleys made their way from sea to sea. but when the Arabs came in A. D. 700. they found 1t choked up. Amrou. the Arab, cleared 1t out, but 1t was soon permitted to i'll up again, and not until the great Napoleon reached Egypt was the canal project again considered. Napoleon abandoned the idea only because his engineers assured him that the level of the Medi- terranean was thirty feet below that of the Red Sea. He then considered ck-and-dam canal, but he evacu- ated Egypt before anything came of 1t. Of course. all those ancient canals were very narrow and shallow, and no boat now dignified with the busi- ness of carrying cargo for profit could have entered any one of them.
 Mehemet Ali, the great Pasha, who founded the present Egyptian khedi- vate, was urged to attempt the canal project, but he was wary. At last he pushed 1t aside and listened to the Eng lishman, Robert Stephenson. the father of the railroad. Under Stephenson's supervision he built a railroad from Cairo to Suez. connecting with the line from Cairo to Alexandria. This formed the great overland route" to India and brought great trade and many rich tolls to the Egyptians.
 The time came when Said Pasha ruled in Cairo. To him came Ferdinand de Lesseps. Years before. while clerk in the French consulate general in Cairo. de Lesseps dreamed the dream of the great canal. He was not an engineer. but he was master diplo- mat. He unfolded his plans to Said, who loved France and all Frenchmen, and met with encouragement. It was a magnificent scheme. The canal was not to cost Egypt one cent, but was to pay Is per cent of its receipts to the Egyptian Government and at the ex- piration of ninety-nine years was to become the absolute property of Egypt. On such terms the concession was given to de Lesseps in 1856.
 Then de Lesseps went forth to get the money. France had just come out