uez Canal, that first emanated from the French
group of Saint Simonian visionaries in the earlier half of the century.
Their dream had taken shape in the fertile and persevering genius of
Lesseps, and was at this time the battle-ground of engineers, statesmen,
and diplomatists in every country in Europe. For fifteen years the
British government had used all their influence at Constantinople to
prevent the Sultan from sanctioning the project. In June a motion of
protest was made in the House of Commons. Lord Palmerston persisted that
the scheme was the greatest bubble that ever was imposed upon the
credulity and simplicity of the people of this country; the public
meetings on its behalf were got up by a pack of foreign projectors;
traffic by the railway would always beat traffic by steamer through the
canal; it would be a step towards the dismemberment of the Turkish
empire; it would tend to dismember our own empire by opening a passage
between the Mediterranean and the Indian ocean, which would be at the
command of other nations and not at ours. Away, then, with such a
sacrifice of the interest of Great Britain to philanthropic schemes and
philosophic reveries! So much for the sound practical man. Mr. Gladstone
followed. Don't let us, he said, have governments and ex-governments
coming down to instruct us here on bubble schemes. As a commercial
project, let the Suez Canal stand or fall upon commercial grounds. With
close reasoning, he argued against the proposition that the canal would
tend to sever Turkey from Egypt. As to possible danger to our own
interests, was it not a canal that would fall within the control of the
strongest maritime power in Europe? And what could that power be but
ourselves? Finally, what could be more unwise than to present ourselves
to the world as the opponents of a scheme on the face of it beneficial
to mankind, on no better ground than remote and contingent danger to
interests of our own, with the alleged interest of Turkey merely thrust
hypocritically in for the purpose of justifying a policy purely
narrow-minded and wholly selfish? The majority against the motion was
large, as it was in the case of the seven cardinals against Galileo.
Still the canal was made, with some very considerable consequences that
were not foreseen either by those who favoured it or those who mocked it
as a bubble. M. de Lesseps wrote to Mr. Gladstone from Constantinople
that the clearness of his speech had enabled