The Zifta Barrage cost about £500,000, the Assouan Dam and the Assiout Barrage £3,200,000. Apart from the ordinary expenditure on maintenance and the suppression of the corvée, the twenty years ended 1902 have seen an expenditure of £9,000,000 devoted to irrigation and drainage. There could be no greater proof of the wisdom of those who have directed Egyptian policy during that period. However pressed they have been at different times by demands for immediate expenditure on other objects when resources were low, they have always adhered steadily to a policy of liberality towards public works likely to be of a remunerative character. In no other country do economic laws work out their results with greater directness and certainty. Reproductive expenditure is really worthy of its name, and brings its visible and tangible fruit almost without a moment’s delay. As they have sown, so have they reaped. There can be no comparison between this expenditure and the benefits it has conferred upon Egypt. Three salient examples may be given to point the force of these remarks. First, the works undertaken by Colonel Ross to improve the system of basin irrigation in Upper Egypt. 1877 was a year of very low flood, and nearly 1,000,000 acres were sharaki—that is, entirely exempted from taxation owing to absence of irrigation. In 1899, a worse year—in fact, the lowest flood of the century—the sharaki lands were no more than 250,000 acres, a result mainly due to the successful reforms carried out by Colonel Ross in 1888-89. 1902 was a year very similar to 1899, and the sharaki acreage was no more than 140,000 acres. Second, the case of the Assiout Barrage. The work was finished a year before the time named in the contract. On August 15, 1902, the usual date of filling the basins, the flood was exceptionally low, and it was decided to lower the gates of the Barrage. By so doing the water-level of the canals was raised by 1½ metres, an increase which was more than sufficient to avert the threatened disaster. The money value of the crops thus secured to the land-owners of the Fayoum and Middle Egypt is estimated at not less than £600,000. The cost of the new works at Assiout, including the new regulator on the Ibrahimiyah Canal, was about £875,000. Thus, in the first year of their existence they nearly repaid their whole cost, and that, too, as it were, by a sidewind; for the Barrage’s real function is to hold up the river in the low summer season, and not in the flood.