The whole of to-day has been spent wandering about the cotton wharves of Alexandria. They extend for a mile or so up and down the Mahmudiyeh Canal, which joins the city to the Nile, and are flanked on the other side by railroads filled with cotton trains from every part of Egypt. These wharves lie under the shadow of Pompey’s Pillar and line the canal almost to the harbour. Upon them are great warehouses filled with bales and bags. Near by are cotton presses, while in the city itself is a great cotton exchange where the people buy and sell, as they do at Liverpool, from the samples of lint which show the quality of the bales brought in from the plantations.

Indeed, cotton is as big a factor here as it is in New Orleans, and the banks of this canal make one think of that city’s great cotton market. The warehouses are of vast extent, and the road between them and the waterway is covered with bales of lint and great bags of cotton seed. Skullcapped blue-gowned Egyptians sit high up on the bales on long-bedded wagons hauled by mules. Other Egyptians unload the bales from the cars and the boats and others carry them to the warehouses. They bear the bales and the bags on their backs, while now and then a man may be seen carrying upon his head a bag of loose cotton weighing a couple of hundred pounds. The cotton seed is taken from the boats in the same way, seed to the amount of three hundred pounds often making one man’s load.

Late in the afternoon I went down to the harbour to see the cotton steamers. They were taking on cargoes for Great Britain, Russia, France, Germany, and the United States. This staple forms three fourths of the exports of Egypt. Millions of pounds of it are annually shipped to the United States, notwithstanding the fact that we raise more than two thirds of all the cotton of the world. Because of its long fibre, there is always a great demand for Egyptian cotton, which is worth more on the average than that of any other country.

For hundreds of years before the reign of that wily old tyrant, Mehemet Ali, whose rule ended with the middle of the nineteenth century, Egypt had gone along with the vast majority of her people poor, working for a wage of ten cents or so a day, and barely out of reach of starvation all the time. Mehemet Ali saw that what she needed to become truly prosperous and raise the standard of living was some crop in which she might be the leader. It was he who introduced long-staple cotton, a product worth three times as much as the common sort, and showed what it could do for his country. Since then King Cotton has been the money maker of the Nile valley, the great White Pharaoh whom the modern Egyptians worship. He has the majority of the Nile farmers in his employ and pays them royally. He has rolled up a wave of prosperity that has engulfed the Nile valley from the Mediterranean to the cataracts and the prospects are that he will continue to make the country richer from year to year. The yield is steadily increasing and with the improved irrigation methods it will soon be greater than ever. From 1895 to 1900 its average annual value was only forty-five million dollars; but after the Aswan Dam was completed it jumped to double that sum.

The greater part of Upper and Lower Egypt can be made to grow cotton, and cotton plantations may eventually cover over five million five hundred thousand acres. If only fifty per cent. of this area is annually put into cotton it will produce upward of two million bales per annum, or more than one sixth as much as the present cotton crop of the world. In addition to this, there might be a further increase by putting water into some of the oases that lie in the valley of the Nile outside the river bottom, and also by draining the great lakes about Alexandria and in other parts of the lower delta.

Egypt has already risen to a high place among the world’s cotton countries. The United States stands first, British India second, and Egypt third. Yet Egypt grows more of this staple for its size and the area planted than any other country on the globe. Its average yield is around four hundred and fifty pounds per acre, which is far in excess of ours. Our Department of Agriculture says that our average is only one hundred and ninety pounds per acre, although we have, of course, many acres which produce five hundred pounds and more.

It is, however, because of its quality rather than its quantity that Egyptian cotton holds such a commanding position in the world’s markets. Cotton-manufacturing countries must depend on Egypt for their chief supply of long-staple fibre. There are some kinds that sell for double the amount our product brings. It is, in fact, the best cotton grown with the exception of the Sea Island raised on the islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. The Sea Island cotton has a rather longer fibre than the Egyptian. The latter is usually brown in colour and is noted for its silkiness, which makes it valuable for manufacturing mercerized goods. We import an enormous quantity of it to mix with our cotton, and we have used the Egyptian seed to develop a species known as American-Egyptian, which possesses the virtues of both kinds.

There is a great difference in the varieties raised, according to the part of the Nile valley from which each kind comes. The best cotton grows in the delta, which produces more than four fifths of the output.

A trip through the Nile cotton fields is an interesting one. The scenes there are not in the least like those of our Southern states. Much of the crop is raised on small farms and every field is marked out with little canals into which the water is introduced from time to time. There are no great farm houses in the landscape and no barns. The people live in mud villages from which they go out to work in the fields. They use odd animals for ploughing and harrowing and the crop is handled in a different way from ours.

Let me give you a few of the pictures I have seen while travelling through the country. Take a look over the delta. It is a wide expanse of green, spotted here and there with white patches. The green consists of alfalfa, Indian corn, or beans. The white is cotton, stretching out before me as far as my eye can follow it.

Here is a field where the lint has been gathered. The earth is black, with windrows of dry stalks running across it. Every stalk has been pulled out by the roots and piled up. Farther on we see another field in which the stalks have been tied into bundles. They will be sold as fuel and will produce a full ton of dry wood to the acre. There are no forests in Egypt, where all sorts of fuel are scarce. The stalks from one acre will sell for two dollars or more. They are used for cooking, for the farm engines on the larger plantations, and even for running the machinery of the ginning establishments. In that village over there one may see great bundles of them stored away on the flat roofs of the houses. Corn fodder is piled up beside them, the leaves having been torn off for stock feed. A queer country this, where the people keep their wood piles on their roofs!

In that field over there they are picking cotton. There are scores of little Egyptian boys and girls bending their dark brown faces above the white bolls. The boys for the most part wear blue gowns and dirty white skullcaps, though some are almost naked. The little girls have cloths over their heads. All are barefooted. They are picking the fibre in baskets and are paid so much per hundred pounds. A boy will gather thirty or forty pounds in a day and does well if he earns as much as ten cents.

The first picking begins in September. After that the land is watered, and a second picking takes place in October. There is a third in November, the soil being irrigated between times. The first and second pickings, which yield the best fibre, are kept apart from the third and sold separately.

After the cotton is picked it is put into great bags and loaded upon camels. They are loading four in that field at the side of the road. The camels lie flat on the ground, with their long necks stretched out. Two bags, which together weigh about six hundred pounds, make a load for each beast. Every bag is as long and wide as the mattress of a single bed and about four feet thick. Listen to the groans of the camels as the freight is piled on. There is one actually weeping. We can see the tears run down his cheeks.

Now watch the awkward beasts get up. Each rises back end first, the bags swaying to and fro as he does so. How angry he is! He goes off with his lower lip hanging down, grumbling and groaning like a spoiled child. The camels make queer figures as they travel. The bags on each side their backs reach almost to the ground, so that the lumbering creatures seem to be walking on six legs apiece.

Looking down the road, we see long caravans of camels loaded with bales, while on the other side of that little canal is a small drove of donkeys bringing in cotton. Each donkey is hidden by a bag that completely covers its back and hides all but its little legs.

In these ways the crop is brought to the railroad stations and to the boats on the canals. The boats go from one little waterway to another until they come into the Mahmudiyeh Canal, and thence to Alexandria. During the harvesting season the railroads are filled with cotton trains. Some of the cotton has been ginned and baled upon the plantations, and the rest is in the seed to be ginned at Alexandria. There are ginning establishments also at the larger cotton markets of the interior. Many of them are run by steam and have as up-to-date machinery as we have. At these gins the seed is carefully saved and shipped to Alexandria by rail or by boat.

The Egyptians put more work on their crop than our Southern farmers do. In the first place, the land has to be ploughed with camels or buffaloes and prepared for the planting. It must be divided into basins, each walled around so that it will hold water, and inside each basin little canals are so arranged that the water will run in and out through every row. The whole field is cut up into these beds, ranging in size from twenty-four to seventy-five feet square.

The cotton plants are from fourteen to twenty inches apart and set in rows thirty-five inches from each other. It takes a little more than a bushel of seed to the acre. The seeds are soaked in water before planting, any which rise to the surface being thrown away. The planting is done by men and boys at a cost of something like a dollar an acre. The seeds soon sprout and the plants appear in ten or twelve days. They are thinned by hand and water is let in upon them, the farmers taking care not to give them too much. The plants are frequently hoed and have water every week or so, almost to the time of picking. The planting is usually done in the month of March, and, as I have said, the first picking begins along in September.

I have been told that cotton, as it is grown here, exhausts the soil and that the people injure the staple and reduce the yield by overcropping. It was formerly planted on the same ground only every third year, the ground being used in the interval for other crops or allowed to lie fallow. At present some of the cotton fields are worked every year and others two years out of three. On most of the farms cotton is planted every other year, whereas the authorities say that in order to have a good yield not more than forty per cent. of a man’s farm should be kept to this crop from year to year. Just as in our Southern states, a year of high cotton prices is likely to lead to overcropping and reduced profits, and vice versa. Another trouble in Egypt, and one which it would seem impossible to get around, is the fact that cotton is practically the only farm crop. This puts the fellaheen more or less at the mercy of fluctuating prices and changing business conditions; so that, like our cotton farmers of the South, they have their lean years and their fat years.

Egypt also has had a lot of trouble with the pink boll weevil. This pestiferous cotton worm, which is to be found all along the valley of the Nile, has also done great damage on the plantations of the Sudan, a thousand miles south of Alexandria. It is said that in one year it destroyed more than ten million dollars’ worth of cotton and that hundreds of the smaller farmers were ruined. The government has been doing all it can to wipe out the plague, but is working under great disadvantages. The Egyptian Mohammedans are fatalists, looking upon such things as the boll weevil as a judgment of God and believing they can do nothing to avert the evil. Consequently, the government had to inaugurate a system of forced labour. It made the boys and men of the cotton region turn out by the thousands to kill the worms under the superintendence of officials. The results were excellent, and as those who were forced into the work were well paid the farmers are beginning to appreciate what has been done for them.

The government helps the cotton planters in other ways. Its agricultural department sends out selected seed for planting a few thousand acres to cotton, contracting with each man who takes it that the government will buy his seed at a price above that of the market. The seed coming in from that venture is enough to plant many more thousands of acres, and this is distributed at cost to such of the farmers as want it. More than one quarter of all seed used has latterly been supplied in this way.

The government has also induced the planters to use artificial fertilizers. It began this some years ago, when it was able to distribute thirty thousand dollars’ worth of chemical fertilizer, and the demand so increased that within a few years more than ten times as much was distributed annually.