THE FRENCH A CADE MY. 305 



to a rule of logic which has never been altered, 

 you were compelled to submit to a long quarantine at 

 Alexandria. M. Mimaut, the French consul, to 

 beguile the tedium of your confinement, brought you 

 the great work published by the Egyptian Commis- 

 sion, specially commending to your notice Lepere's 

 treatise upon the junction of the two seas. It was in 

 this way that you became acquainted with the isthmus 

 and its history. Henceforward the ambition to realise 

 what others had conceived took hold upon you, and 

 though you had to wait twenty-three years, nothing 

 rebuffed you. You were born to pierce isthmuses, 

 and antiquity would have made a myth of you. You 

 are the man of our age upon whose forehead is 

 most clearly written the sign of an unmistakable 

 vocation. The principle of great deeds is to take 

 possession of force where it is to be found, to pur- 

 chase it at its proper price, and to know how to make 

 use of it. In the present condition of the world 

 barbarism is still an immense depot of living forces. 

 Your keen and open intelligence saw that immense 

 power is often invested in hands incapable of making 

 use of it, and that this power is at the disposal of any- 

 one who knows how to employ it. You frankly 

 take human affairs as they are. You do not mind 

 the contact of stupidity and folly. It is all very well, 

 you say, for those who do not touch the realities of 

 life to be fastidious and to remain immaculate. 

 Humanity is composed of two thousand millions of 



