BOER WAPv LIKELY TO STOP 



THE WORLD'S GREATEST 



ENGINEERING EFFORT. 



OVER TWO MILLION STRUGGLING PEASANTS 

 DIRECTLY AFFECTED. 



One possible result of the Boer war that has generally been over- 

 looked is that it may put an end to the greatest engineering effort 

 which has ever been begun in the world the damming of the Nile. 

 Should those complications ensue that have been foreshadowed, the 

 intervention of one pretext or another of Russia, France and Ger- 

 many, about the first thing to happen would be the forced evacuation 

 of Egypt by the British. Her majesty would be too fully engaged in 

 other directions to hold the country where she had only been 

 "tolerated," as the Frenchmen say with gritted teeth. With the 

 withdrawal of England, the Nile improvements would cease at once,, 

 and an end, perhaps only a temporarily end to be sure, would be put 

 to the Nile enterprise. 



Nothing more serious or more pitiful could happen. The stop- 

 page of the work on the Nile dams would be a calamity involving the 

 progress of the entire Egyptian people, of whom there are over 

 9,000,000. It would affect directly over 2,000,000 peasants, who will 

 be put back just as many years as the work is interrupted. Its early 

 completion means to these 2,000,000 the lifting of a burden of taxation 

 under which they are struggling without hope of relief from any 

 other source. 



To the world at large the successful issue of the Nile work will 

 mean the readjustment of physical geography on a scale never before 

 attempted by man. The reclamation of the desert of Sahara could 

 alone be put in the same category. It is not alone that 2,500,000 

 acres of land will be brought under yield; that over 200,000,000 will 

 be added to the];land values of the Egyptian people; that the popu- 

 lation of the country will be practically doubled in a few years; but 

 that a greater area of the surface of the earth will be changed, be 

 made over, as it were, than has ever been affected before in the 

 recorded history of the human race since the time of Noah. There. 



