Sir Evelyn Baring, now Lord Cromer, and the ruling figure in Egypt, has served his country as faithfully and as successfully as any man in her debt to-day. He has been in Egypt from the beginning of these ten years, and he has been given almost unlimited power and authority by his own country, of which his nominal position of Consul-General and Diplomatic Agent is no criterion. He is a typical Englishman in appearance, broad-shouldered and big all over, with a smooth-shaven face, and the look of having just come fresh from a bath. In conversation he thinks much more of what he has to say than of how he says it; by that I mean that he is direct, and even abrupt; the Egyptians found him most unpleasantly so. But were he more tactful, he would probably have been better liked personally, but would not have succeeded in doing what he has done so well. I do not like what he has done, but I want to be fair in showing that for the work he was sent to do he is probably the best man England could have selected. A man less self-reliant might have feared to compromise himself with home authorities, and would have temporized and lost where Lord Cromer bullied and browbeat and won. He is a very remarkable man. He studies for a half-hour every day after breakfast, and plays tennis in the afternoon. When he is in his own room, with a pipe in his mouth, he can talk more interestingly and with more exact knowledge of Egypt than any man in the world, and your admiration for him is unbounded. In the rooms of the legation, on the contrary, or, again, when advising a minister of the Khedive or the Khedive himself, he can be as intensely disagreeable in his manner and as powerfully aggressive as a polar-bear. During the last so-called "crisis" he gave the Khedive twenty-four hours in which to dismiss his Prime-minister. He did this with the assurance from the English Foreign Office that the home government would support him. He then cabled with one hand to Malta for troops and with the other stopped the Black Watch at Aden on their way to India, and called them back to Cairo, after which he went out in full sight of the public and banged tennis balls about until sunset. A man who can call out "forty, love!" "forty, fifteen!" in a calm voice two hours after sending an ultimatum to a Khedive and disarranging the movements of six thousand of her Majesty's troops will get what he wants in the end, and a boy of eighteen is hardly a fair match for him.