A few days later a Greek Consul came to Tunis for the first time, and proposed to the Bey an exchange of orders. Muhamed es Sadek only wished he could so easily satisfy M. Roustan and Signor Maccio. A Tunisian general was at once sent in the company of M. Valensi, the Bey’s second interpreter, with a case of Nichans to Athens. After the ceremony of investiture, M. Valensi addressed the king in a speech beginning with the following sentence:—“I am charged by my august Sovereign, the Bey of Tunis, to inform your Majesty that since the arrival of the Greek Consul, _almost all the assassins and brigands in his dominions have entirely disappeared._” . . . The king, however, took the reflection on his country thus accidentally conveyed in excellent part, and the Tunisian mission is not yet forgotten in Greece. Early in 1880 M. Géry arrived at Tunis to obtain a concession for a port at the Goletta, but the Bey declined for the present entertaining the proposal. Not to be outdone by M. Roustan, Signor Maccio asked for permission to lay a telegraphic cable from Cape Bon to Sicily, but he was now encroaching on one of the most valuable and serviceable of the pretended French monopolies, and the Bey dared not grant his request. Muhamed es Sadek was doubly wrong; in the first place, the French monopoly is a myth, and secondly, it proved to be the exclusive possession of the telegraph, which more than anything else facilitated the aggression of April 1881. The three telegraph concessions made by the Tunisian Government to France are now before me. The first is dated the 24th of October 1859; the second, the 19th of April 1861; the third merely provides for a telegraph station at Bizerta, and contains the same provisions as the preceding ones. The first concession consists of only ten articles. In the first article the French are allowed to construct a line from Tunis to the Algerian frontier, and it is provided that, on its completion, the Tunisian Government may obtain possession of it, by reimbursing the French Government for its outlay. Of so temporary a nature was this first grant considered, that it is expressly stipulated, in the fourth and fifth articles of the convention, that, as soon as the Tunisian Government obtained the line, the buildings employed for the service should revert to it, and the French officials should resume their functions as French telegraphic _employés_. From the first word to the last not even the faintest shadow of a monopoly is created by the concession of 1859. We now come to the second convention of 1861. It contains only eleven articles, and admits of only one interpretation. Article I. runs as follows:—“Le Gouvernement Tunisien rachète les lignes du télégraphe électrique créés en Tunisie par les soins du Gouvernement Français depuis la Goulette, Tunis et Bardo jusqu’à la frontière Algérienne moyennant une somme de 91,997 francs et centimes, montant des dépenses faites pour leur installation. . . .