AND LOWER £GYPT, 31I 



No real happlnesscan exist independent of peace; 

 without it no society can prosper. If these incon- 

 testable truths are applied to the expedition into 

 Egypt, it will bean easy matter to discern that the 

 new colony, desolated by the double plague of an 

 intestine and external war, can never attain a flou- 

 rishinir condition. The various tribes which in- 

 habit it, and which perhaps ought to have been 

 disposed for revolution rather than attacked as ene- 

 mies ; animated by a fanaticism extravagant, be- 

 cause it is founded on the grossest ignorance, and 

 inflamed besides by the enemies of France and of 

 the general repose, abandon the cultivation of the 

 ground or lay waste the crops, if any have been 

 produced. The fields are trampled under the feet 

 of warriors, and all the horrid preparatives for car- 

 nage ; plains, which a succession of ages had seen 

 arrayed in harvests the most copious, with wonder 

 behold themselves overshadowed by tents. The 

 labours which the military art requires operate only 

 to the detriment of that of agriculture. Several 

 points on the surface of the earth change their ap- 

 pearance and their nature, and it is easy to con- 

 ceive how prejudicial these partial derangements 

 must be in a country where fertility is, if 1 may use 

 ihc expression, merely factitious, and where it can- 

 not exist at all without the aids which the people of 

 ancient Egypt have multiplied with so much skill 

 and judgment. 



X 4 The 



