Nominally a province of the Turkish Empire, and administered by a viceroy who theoretically derives his power from the Turkish sovereign, Egypt is autonomous (so far as Turkey is concerned), though it still pays annual tribute of about three million five hundred thousand dollars to the Sultan. Though the title “khedive” means sovereign or king, without qualification or limitation, the real ruler of Egypt is not his Highness Abbas Hilmi II, but his Britannic Majesty's Agent and Consul-General—at present Lord Kitchener of Khartoum—who, though officially Britain's diplomatic representative in Egypt and nothing more, in reality exercises almost unlimited authority and power. In other words, England has assumed the position of a receiver for Egypt's foreign creditors and has apparently made the receivership—which has never been agreeable to the khedivial government—a permanent one. Egypt's situation might, indeed, be quite aptly compared to a railway system which has been forced into bankruptcy by the extravagant methods of its directors, and one of whose largest creditors has become receiver with full power to reorganise the system for its stockholders' and its creditors' best good. Another feature of Egypt's complex form of government is the International Debt Commission, which consists of delegates from England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Italy, who are stationed at Cairo for the purpose of keeping an eye on the national revenues and periodically collecting a share of them, over and above the actual running expenses of the government, to pay the interest on the Egyptian bonds held in those countries. To this administrative medley must be added the complications caused by the Ottoman Capitulations—by which fourteen foreign governments, including our own, exercise almost sovereign rights in Egypt, the International Tribunals, or “Mixed Courts,” in the control of which Egypt has almost nothing to say, giving them complete jurisdiction in all civil cases in which aliens may be involved with each other or with Egyptians, while the foreign consuls possess absolute authority in criminal cases where their nationals are concerned.