BRITISH INTERVENTION. 297 fairly accused of having sought to bring about an armed intervention in Egypt for her own profit or aggrandizement, or, still less, with any view to providing herself with a pretext for the permanent occupation of Egypt One of the first acts rendered compulsory by the necessities of intervention was the occupation of the Suez Canal. In a country where there are no roads, and where even the dykes are so narrow that there is barely room for one camel to pass another, rivers and canals afford the best, if not the only, means of transporting troops and guns. A mere glance at a map of the Delta will show that the Suez Canal may be a " neutral highway " in time of peace, but that it never can be excluded from the area of military operations, in the event of war. Whatever legal view may be taken by International jurists, the neutrality of the Canal will infallibly be treated as null and void whenever Egypt is involved in war. All that was demanded by the commanders of the British army was the right-, to use the Canal for the passage of troops, and to occupy certain points on the banks which were necessary for the defence of the Canal. In as far as I can ascertain, the French Government did not dispute the reasonableness of these demands. Nobody out of Bedlam could imagine that the British Government had any intention of injuring the Suez Canal Company, in which it was the largest single shareholder, or had the slightest wish to interfere with an enterprise to which British trade contributed at that period