The London Chamber of Commerce met on Wednesday at the
Cannon-Street Hotel, under the presidency of Mr. Herbert Tritton, the Chairman of the Council, who made a very tem- perate speech on the subject of the Government proposal for the Suez Canal, in which, while doing full justice to the rights of M. de Lesseps and the present Company, he insisted on the inten- tion of the Khedive in the original concession to form a "universal Company," directed by a "Council, composed of the principal nationalities interested in the enterprise." No doubt that was a part of the original design, but it was a part of it deliberately foiled by Lord Palmerston, who was advised that the whole concern was a swindle, and who would not bear of any English representative element in the Council. Even Mr. Disraeli in the Tory Government of 1866-68,—not of course in that of 1874-1880,—took the same line, and did all he could to render the representative character of the scheme impossible ; so that it is hardly feasible now for us to try and revive, as a matter of abstract right, a principle of national representation in the Council which we were the first to ignore and defeat when the Company was founded. Alderman Cotton's speech was in a very different tone from Mr. Tritton's,—in the true spirit of the commercial Jingo. "They ought to see," the Standard reports him to have said, "that the second Suez Canal was made in English interests, and English interests only. Ostensibly it is not, but really, and in his own mind, he considered Egypt was England's property." This is the kind of view which gets for commercial England so mean a repute in the public opinion of the world. The rest of the discussion was in a better tone, and the resolution carried was in favour of a commission of inquiry,—a futile recommenda- tion, as there is nothing uncertain which a commission of inquiry could find out.
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