to sail round Africa; and from that day the stream of eastern wealth
flowed no longer through the Red Sea, or the Persian Gulf, on its way to
the new countries of the West; and not only Alexandria, but Damietta and
Bagdad, dwindled down to their present insignificance. And yet the
whirligig of time brings about its revenges. The stream of commerce is
now rapidly turning back to its old channel; and British science bids
fair to make Alexandria once more the inn of all the nations.

It is with a feeling of awe that one looks upon the huge possibilities
of her future. Her own physical capacities, as the great mind of
Napoleon saw, are what they always have been, inexhaustible; and science
has learnt to set at naught the only defect of situation which has ever
injured her prosperity, namely, the short land passage from the Nile to
the Red Sea. The fate of Palestine is now more than ever bound up with
her fate; and a British or French colony might, holding the two
countries, develop itself into a nation as vast as sprang from
Alexander's handful of Macedonians, and become the meeting point for the
nations of the West and those great Anglo-Saxon peoples who seem
destined to spring up in the Australian ocean. Wide as the dream may
appear, steam has made it a far narrower one than the old actual fact,
that for centuries the Phoenician and the Arabian interchanged at
Alexandria the produce of Britain for that of Ceylon and Hindostan. And
as for intellectual development, though Alexandria wants, as she has
always wanted, that insular and exclusive position which seems almost
necessary to develop original thought and original national life, yet
she may still act as the point of fusion for distinct schools and
polities, and the young and buoyant vigour of the new-born nations may
at once teach, and learn from, the prudence, the experience, the
traditional wisdom of the ancient Europeans.