he Pharaohs. In his first interview with the
governor of St. Helena, the illustrious exile said emphatically:
"Egypt is the most important country in the world." The words reveal a
keen perception of all the influences conducive to commercial
prosperity and imperial greatness. Egypt, in fact, with the Suez
Canal, which his imagination always pictured as a necessary adjunct,
was to be the keystone of that arch of empire which was to span the
oceans and link the prairies of the far west to the teeming plains of
India and the far Austral Isles.

The motives which impelled Napoleon to the enterprises now to be
considered were as many-sided as the maritime ventures themselves.
Ultimately, doubtless, they arose out of a love of vast undertakings
that ministered at once to an expanding ambition and to that need of
arduous administrative toils for which his mind ever craved in the
heyday of its activity. And, while satiating the grinding powers of
his otherwise morbidly restless spirit, these enterprises also fed and
soothed those imperious, if unconscious, instincts which prompt every
able man of inquiring mind to reclaim all possible domains from the
unknown or the chaotic. As Egypt had, for the present at least, been
reft from his grasp, he turned naturally to all other lands that could
be forced to yield their secrets to the inquirer, or their comforts to
the benefactors of mankind. Only a dull cynicism can deny this motive
to the man who first unlocked the doors of Egyptian civilization; and
it would be equally futile to deny to him the same beneficent aims
with regard to the settlement of the plains of the Mississippi, and
the coasts of New Holland.

The peculiarities of the condition of France furnished another
powerful impulse towards colonization. In the last decade her people
had suffered from an excess of mental activity and nervous excitement.
From philosophical and political speculation they must be brought back
to the practical and prosaic; and what influence could be so healthy
as the turning up of new soil and other processes that satisfy the
primitive instincts? Some of these, it was true, were being met by the
increasing peasant proprietary in France herself. But this internal
development, salutary as it was, could not appease the restless
spirits of the towns or the ambition of the soldiery. Foreign
adventures and oceanic commerce alone could satisfy the Parisians and
open up new careers for the Praetorian