Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/172

 BM WORKMEN AND HEROES During the period of his residence in Egypt, as consul for France, he must often have heard the project of a canal across the Isthmus of Suez discussed, since the course of events was every year making the necessity of the undertak ing more evident. As is well known, the idea of such a canal was not a new one : Herodotus speaks of a canal designed and partly excavated by Pharaoh Necho in the seventh century before Christ, to connect the city of Bubastis, in the Delta of the Nile, with the Red Sea. As planned, the canal was to be ten feet deep with a width sufficient for two triremes to pass abreast, and it was expected that the voyage would be accomplished in four days. After the lives of 126,000 Egyptian workmen had been sacrificed to the hardships of the undertaking, He- rodotus says that Necho, alarmed at the difficulties and expense, consulted the Oracle as to what was best for him to do, and received the answer : " Thou art working for barbarians." The Egyptians, like the Greeks, considered all for- eigners as barbarians, and the answer simply reflected the sentiment of the people, or of their leaders, that this vast expenditure of labor, time, and money would prove to be, after all, as much for the benefit of foreigners as for themselves. The Oracle gave a voice to national and political prejudices, such as even in our own time are continually evoked to block the wheels of great enterprises. Necho, we are told, heeded the warning of the Oracle and abandoned the enterprise, but about one hundred years later, in the time of Darius Hystaspes, work on the canal was resumed and the undertaking was completed. From time to time we find men- tion made of the canal by later authors, but about the end of the eighth century of our era it was finally abandoned and left to be blocked up by the sand. The project was revived by Napoleon I. at the time of his Egyptian expedi- tion ; but, on the report of his engineer, M. Lepere, now known to be mistaken, that the Red Sea level was thirty feet higher than that of the Mediterranean, nothing further was done ; nor was it until so late as 1847 that it was again taken up and an attempt made to interest the maritime powers of Europe in the scheme ; but nothing serious was accomplished. In truth, the idea of a canal uniting the two seas, had up to this time been largely sentimental, if we may so express it ; rather connected with vast schemes of conquest than founded on the vital needs of commercial development and the material good of the people. The commerce of the Mediterranean countries with India and the remoter East had not in those earlier times reached a point where such a costly undertaking as the Suez Canal could prove remunerative ; what trade there was could be sufficiently and more cheaply accommodated by the Overland machinery of caravans, while France, Spain, and England still found the route by the Cape to answer all their purposes. In fact it was more than doubtful whether sailing-vessels, by means of which trade was then chiefly carried on, or even steamers of the build then employed, could use the canal to profit. It was believed that the advantages promised by a shorter route would be counterbalanced by the delays and dangers reckoned inseparable from the nav- igation of so narrow a water-way. These objections, really of a serious nature, m "ide it difficult to win over the