Nor can it be doubted that either of them would
have achieved his ambition but for the appearance against them of a
material power greater than their own, and which then, for the first
time, began to make itself felt as paramount in Asia. That power was
England, and the ambitions she thwarted there were those of Bonaparte
and Mehemet Ali.
It is not, I believe, sufficiently understood how vast a scheme was
overthrown by the Battle of the Nile. Napoleon's mind was formed for
dominion in the East, and where he failed in Europe he would have
infallibly succeeded in Asia. There little policies are useless, and
great ones root themselves in a congenial soil; and he was possessed
with an idea which must have flourished. His English opponents, judging
him only by the scale of their own thoughts, credited him with the
inferior design of invading India through Persia, and called it a mad
one; but India was, in fact, a small part only of his programme. When he
publicly pronounced the Kelemat at Cairo, and professed the faith of
Islam, he intended to be its Head, arguing rightly that what had been
possible three hundred years before to Selim was possible also then to
him. Nor would the Mussulman world have been much more astonished in
1799 at being asked to accept a Bonaparte for Caliph, than it was in
1519 at being asked to accept an Ottoman.
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