Lord Derby, in answer to a deputation yesterday week, which
waited upon him to point out the danger of an Egyptain conquest of Abyssinia and the probable consequence,—a spread of the Egyptian slavery to Abyssinia—expressed his strong feeling that such annexation would be very unwise policy on the part of Egypt, and he added that if he had any reason to believe that such a step was contemplated, he should not hesitate to point out the extreme impolicy of that course. He did not, how- ever, believe that any step of the kind was intended, and he gave the Khedive credit for wishing to stop the slave-trade, rather than to extend it. And as soon as the Khedive gets English advice like Lord Derby's, which it seems to him emin- ently desirable to attend to, no doubt he will do what he can to put an end to the slave-trade ; but it is extremely unlikely that hitherto he has personally cared an atom about it, except so far as he may occasionally have derived an incidental profit from it in his various Southern expeditions. Rulers like the Khedive and the Sultan of Zanzibar want a permanent European goad to their conscience, before they can really be supposed to object to the slave-trade at all.
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