Ismail was the first Khedive who discovered that the easiest way to get money is to borrow it. He found that all one has to do is to sign a paper, and you get the money. It was very easy for Ismail to borrow money, because the credit of Egypt was good and sound in itself, and because foreigners, who even at that time swarmed in Egypt, knew that the repudiation of debts, while possible in a powerful or free government, was not to be feared from that country. So there began a reign of extravagance for which history has no parallel. If "money breeds money," it is also true that those who spend money freely are given more chances to do so than any one else. Adventurers, charlatans, rascals of every climate and every nationality, swarmed down upon Cairo, and fought with one another for a chance to glut themselves at the repast which this reckless profligate spread for all comers. No man probably was ever so basely cheated as was Ismail, or on so magnificent a scale. And nothing remains but ruins to show where the money spent on his own personal pleasure was bestowed. That other magnificent reprobate, William M. Tweed, left monuments like the Court House to commemorate his thefts of public money; but Ismail's palaces are falling in pieces, the rain has washed the paint off the boards, the tips of the crescents are broken, and great gardens filled with fountains and mosaic paths are choked with weeds and covered with fallen leaves and the dirt and dust of neglect and decay. You can walk over long marble floors which have sunk by their own weight through the rotten foundations, and see yourself at full length in bleared mirrors surrounded by the gilt borders and blue silken curtains of the Second Empire. Ismail ordered these palaces as men order hats, and threw them away as you toss an empty cartridge from a gun-barrel. And that was all the most of them ever were, empty cartridges, mere shells of wood painted to look like marble, and gilding and mirrors, as tasteless as the buildings at the Centennial Exposition, and lasting as long.