26 THE STORY OF THE KHEDIVATE.

Prince-President overthrew the Republic in France by the coup d'dtai of the 2nd of December, and established himself upon the throne as Napoleon III. Under the Empire France continued the policy pursued by the monarchy of July, and claimed, in virtue of the indirect support she had given to the Viceroy in his contest with Turkey, to be considered the special protectress of the dynasty founded by JMahomet Ali. The scheme for connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea by cutting a ship canal through the Isthmus of Suez was then, so to speak, in the air. It was matter of history that at not a very remote period a waterway had existed by which vessels of small burden had been conveyed from one sea to the other. But it is only fair to say, that though M. de Lesseps did not originate the idea of the Suez Canal, he was the firs: person to embody thisjdeajnapractical form. It seems strange, looking back on the past with our present experience, that anybody should ever have seriously questioned the feasibility of the project. To dig a tjrench of sortTg eighty miles in lengthy through the soft sand of the desert, lying between Egypt and the Holy Land, would hardly be regarded nowadays as an enterprise offering any formidable difficulty. But at the time when the project was first broached, it encountered the most bitter and widespread opposition. The only serious arguments I ever heard adduced to show that the scheme could never be carried into execution was that the sand walls of the Canal would be washed