military system would require. His successor, Said Pasha, was peacefully inclined, and undertook several public works. The Suez Canal was begun during his reign, and his memory is preserved in the name of Port Said, the artificial harbor at the Mediterranean entrance of the canal. But he had the mania for extravagancies which characterized his predecessor, and at his death in 1863 he left a legacy of debt to his successor, Ismail.
Little was done under Abbas Pasha and his successor, Said, for the extension of Egyptian dominion beyond what had been left by Mohammed Ali. The fever of conquest broke out anew with Ismail, and soon after his accession to the throne he sent his armies into the regions of the Upper Nile, which he rapidly added to his dominions. From Khartoum, which had been, since its foundation in 1822, the frontier city, his dominion was rapidly pushed into the Soudan, and in the ten years between 1868 and 1878 the Egyptian flag was carried more than 1,000 miles southward, till it floated on the shores of the Central African lakes. Mohammed Ali's conquests were undertaken largely with the view of obtaining soldiers for his army. The men of the Soudan were sent captive to Cairo and converted into soldiers, under the training of French officers; during and since Mohammed Ali's time the flower of the Egyptian army has been the Soudanese portion, and at times there have been not less than 25,000 or 30,000 soldiers under the flag, every man of whom came from the provinces of the Upper Nile. The Soudanese are naturally warlike, can endure heat, fatigue, and privation, and in every way are vastly superior to the fellaheen of Lower Egypt, whose courage and fighting qualities were extinguished centuries ago by the oppression under which they lived. The Soudanese did not specially object to being converted into soldiers, and if the pashas had been content with a few thousands of them annually, had kept the slave trade under proper restrictions, and avoided the imposition
