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It is with a feeling of awe that one looks upon the huge possibilities
of her future. Her own physical capacities, as the great mind of
Napoleon saw, are what they always have been, inexhaustible; and science
has learnt to set at naught the only defect of situation which has ever
injured her prosperity, namely, the short land passage from the Nile to
the Red Sea. The fate of Palestine is now more than ever bound up with
her fate; and a British or French colony might, holding the two
countries, develop itself into a nation as vast as sprang from
Alexander's handful of Macedonians, and become the meeting point for the
nations of the West and those great Anglo-Saxon peoples who seem
destined to spring up in the Australian ocean. Wide as the dream may
appear, steam has made it a far narrower one than the old actual fact,
that for centuries the Phoenician and the Arabian interchanged at
Alexandria the produce of Britain for that of Ceylon and Hindostan. And
as for intellectual development, though Alexandria wants, as she has
always wanted, that insular and exclusive position which seems almost
necessary to develop original thought and original national life, yet
she may still act as the point of fusion for distinct schools and
polities, and the young and buoyant vigour of the new-born nations may
at once teach, and learn from, the prudence, the experience, the
traditional wisdom of the ancient Europeans.
This vision, however possible, may be a far-off one: but the first step
towards it, at least, is being laid before our eyes--and that is, a
fresh reconciliation between the Crescent and the Cross. Apart from all
political considerations, which would be out of place here, I hail, as a
student of philosophy, the school which is now, both in Alexandria and
in Constantinople, teaching to Moslem and to Christians the same lesson
which the Crusaders learnt in Egypt five hundred years ago. A few
years' more perseverance in the valiant and righteous course which
Britain has now chosen, will reward itself by opening a vast field for
capital and enterprise, for the introduction of civil and religious
liberty among the down-trodden peasantry of Egypt; as the Giaour becomes
an object of respect, and trust, and gratitude to the Moslem; and as the
feeling that Moslem and Giaour own a common humanity, a common eternal
standard of justice and mercy, a common sacred obligation to perform our
promises, and to succour the oppressed, shall have taken place of the
old brute wonder at our careless audacity, and awkward assertion of
power, which now expresses itself in the somewhat left-handed
Alexandrian compliment--"There is one Satan, and there are many Satans:
but there is no Satan like a Frank in a round hat."
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