Bankrupts and Brokers 69
only sentimental and scientific. It was the megalomania of
the Egyptian dynasty and the resources put at its dis-
posal, both by the last years of forced labour in Egypt
and by the first years of free loans in Europe, that
brought this project to completion at the very worst
moment for the interests of the future Egyptian
nation.
The international involvements of the Suez Canal have
been from the first, and still are to-day, one of the two
obstacles to the full sovereignty of an Egyptian nation;
the other being the imperial interests of Egypt in the
Sudan. It was, moreover, mainly the Suez Canal that
brought Egypt for a quarter of a century under British
administration. And it is therefore due to the British to
make it clear that it was not they who forced the Canal on
Egypt. The project was first put in hand by Napoleon's
engineers. But their arithmetical error, which repre-
sented the Mediterranean as thirty feet below the Red
Sea instead of, as it is, on a level with it, was not finally
corrected till 1847. This imaginary obstacle to a sea-
level canal, combined with the political opposition of
Mehemet Ali and the strategic opposition of the British,
postponed any attempt to realise the project. Moreover,
until steam had replaced sails in passenger traffic and
until the narrow seas were cleared of corsairs, the Red
Sea was almost as great an obstacle to navigation as was
the Isthmus. In 1801 Baird's transports took three
months for the passage from Bombay to Kosseir ; and later
reinforcements were sent round by the Cape.
M. de Lesseps, who had become interested in the
scheme as French Consul-General and who had be-
friended Said when exiled in Paris by Abbas, had, by an
importunity that in a lesset cause would have been
impudent, induced the good-natured giant to give him a